Extended Abstract: Towards Physical-Layer Authentication for Backscatter Devices

Abstract

Backscatter communications relieves sensor tags from the energy-intensive task of generating their own radio waves. This enables sensor tags to transmit their sensor readings at an energy consumption that is several orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional lowpower radios. The resource-constraints of typical backscatter tags, however, make it challenging to provide security for them. In this extended abstract, we take a first step towards authentication of backscatter transmissions. We propose to add authentication information in the chip sequences of the physical layer. We discuss design issues and in particular the trade-off between security and reliability and propose mechanisms to enable low-power authentication suitable for backscatter tags.