A cGAN Empowered Physical Layer Authentication Against Malicious RIS Attacks


Bendaimi A., Abdallah A., Celik A., Eltawil A. M., ARSLAN H.

2026 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2026, Glasgow, İngiltere, 24 - 28 Mayıs 2026, (Tam Metin Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Tam Metin Bildiri
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1109/icc59461.2026.11586967
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Glasgow
  • Basıldığı Ülke: İngiltere
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: cGAN, CSI, mMalicious RIS, pPhysical layer authentication, RIS, sSpoofing attack
  • İstanbul Medipol Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a transformative technology for next-generation wireless networks, offering unprecedented control over radio propagation environments. However, their passive nature and ease of deployment introduces security vulnerabilities that remain largely unexplored. This paper investigates a spoofing attack where a malicious RIS strategically manipulates its reflection coefficients to impersonate a legitimate RIS, thereby deceiving the base station (BS) and gaining unauthorized network access. To counter this threat, we propose a novel authentication framework that formulates the detection problem as a data-driven binary classification task, leveraging conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN). The framework employs a U-Net-based generator to synthesize realistic attack scenarios during training, while the discriminator serves as a lightweight authenticator enabling robust authentication without requiring apriori knowledge of attacker strategies. Through extensive simulations across diverse attack scenarios, including co-located and correlated configurations, we demonstrate that the trained discriminator achieves 96.4% detection accuracy against malicious RIS attackers positioned near the BS (co-located) and maintains 86.2% accuracy under correlated attack conditions.