Division-based Receiver-agnostic RFF Identification in WiFi Systems

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification is a promising technique for identifying Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on RFF identification, which covers various aspects ranging from related definitions to details of each stage in the identification process, namely signal preprocessing, RFF feature extraction, further processing, and RFF identification. Specifically, three main steps of preprocessing are summarized, including carrier frequency offset estimation, noise elimination, and channel cancellation. Besides, three kinds of RFFs are categorized, comprising I/Q signal-based, parameter-based, and transformation-based features. Meanwhile, feature fusion and feature dimension reduction are elaborated as two main further processing methods. Furthermore, a novel framework is established from the perspective of closed set and open set problems, and the related state-of-the-art methodologies are investigated, including approaches based on traditional machine learning, deep learning, and generative models. Additionally, we highlight the challenges faced by RFF identification and point out future research trends in this field.

Aiming at the actual application scenario of radio frequency (RF) fingerprint identification, a low-cost, small-volume embedded system for specific identification of RF devices is designed and implemented, and the improved VGG-16 model is used to extract the RF fingerprint features of RF signals. The hardware of the system consists of two parts: the RF Signal Acquisition Module and the RF Fingerprint Identification Module. The RF Signal Acquisition Module uses Zedboard as the main control board, and the AD9361 chip is the RF signal receiving circuit; the RF Fingerprint Identification Module uses FPGA to accelerate the deep learning algorithm, and displays the identification results on the host computer. Using 6 wireless routers of the same model for testing, the system has an identification accuracy rate of 96% for wireless routers in the actual electromagnetic environment, and the real-time identification feedback time is about 6 seconds, which has a certain practical application value.

With the rapid development of the cognitive radio networks, the number of terminal devices has exploded. Massive devices generate a large amount of privacy-sensitive data, typically WiFi signals. This paper proposes a method for Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting identification of WiFi signals based on federated learning, which trains a cooperative model to complete RF fingerprinting identification without transmitting privacy-sensitive data. The experimental findings on a real-world dataset validate that the strategy described in this study increases the RF fingerprinting identification accuracy in a variety of size circumstances, and ensures that data privacy will not be compromised.

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile cellular network is vulnerable to various security threats. Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification is an emerging physical layer authentication technique which can be used to detect spoofing and distributed denial of service attacks. In this paper, the performance of RFF identification is studied for 5G mobile phones. The differential constellation trace figure (DCTF) is extracted from the physical random access channel (PRACH) preamble. When the database of all 64 PRACH preambles is available at the gNodeB (gNB), an index-based DCTF identification scheme is proposed, and the classification accuracy reaches 92.78% with a signal-to-noise ratio of 25 dB. Moreover, due to the randomness in the selection of preamble sequences in the random access procedure, when only a portion of the preamble sequences can be trained, a group-based DCTF identification scheme is proposed. The preamble sequences generated from the same root value are grouped together, and the untrained sequences can be identified based on the trained sequences within the same group. The classification accuracy of the group-based scheme is 89.59%. An experimental system has been set up using six 5G mobile phones of three models. The 5G gNB is implemented on the OpenAirInterface platform.

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprint representing the inherent hardware characteristics of mobile devices has been employed to classify and identify wireless devices for the security of Internet of Things (IoT). Existing works on RF fingerprinting are usually based on the amplitude or phase of RF signal envelope, which leads to relatively coarse features. Moreover, the classification performance over small sample dataset is poor. To solve the problem, a novel device identification method based on RF fingerprinting with on deep learning is proposed. In particular, the RF signal are transformed into two dimensional representations by image preprocessing. Then the gray images representing the RF fingerprints are classified by employing classical CNN. To verify the performance of the proposed approach, a testbed is constructed by using MATLAB build framework of gray image preprocessing. Extensive experiment results show that the identification accuracy can reach at least 90%. Even with the sample rate of 20Gsps. Particularly, the accuracy of iPhone can reach 100%. It is verified that the proposed method can effectively classify mobile devices even with small sample RF fingerprints represented two dimensional gray images,

Recently, network security has become a major challenge in communication networks. Most wireless networks are exposed to some penetrative attacks such as signal interception, spoofing, and stray. Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting is considered to be a promising solution for network security problems and has been applied with various improvements. In this paper, extensive data from Bluetooth (BT) devices are utilized in RF fingerprinting implementation. Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) has been used, for the first time, for RF fingerprinting of Bluetooth (BT) device identification. In this way, time-frequency-energy distributions (TFED) are utilized. By means of the signals' energy envelopes, the transient signals are detected with some improvements. Thirteen features are extracted from the signals' transients along with their TFEDs. The extracted features are pre-processed to evaluate their usability. The implementation of three different classifiers to the extracted features is provided for the first time in this paper. A comparative analysis based on the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves, the associated areas under curves (AUC), and confusion matrix are obtained to visualize the performance of the applied classifiers. In doing this, different levels of signal to noise ratio (SNR) levels are used to evaluate the robustness of the extracted features and the classifier performances. The classification performance demonstrates the feasibility of the method. The results of this paper may help readers assess the usability of RF fingerprinting for BT signals at the physical layer security of wireless networks.

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting technology has been developed as a unique method for maintaining security based on physical layer characteristics. In this paper, we propose the RF fingerprinting by extracting the parameter characteristics such as information dimension, constellation feature, and phase noise spectrum in the transmitted information when applied to the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio (SDR) platform. To achieve a great performance improvement of classification, not only the traditional support vector machine (SVM) classifier, but also the machine-based integrated classifier bagged tree and the adaptive weighting algorithm weighted k-nearest neighbor (KNN) are both discussed. It is demonstrated that the proposed method achieves good classification performance under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).

Given the current radio frequency(RF) fingerprint identification methods based on deep learning, there is a problem of poor recognition performance in the scene of RF fingerprint offset. This paper designs an Internet of Things (IoT) devices identification system based on software defined radio(SDR) and transfer learning (TL) technology. The main advantage of this system is to use the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) to collect the RF signals of IoT devices and identify the RF signals preprocessed by SDR based on transfer learning. This system can reduce data redundancy and model complexity, has the characteristics of lightweight and high efficiency and meet different experimental scenarios' needs. The experimental results show that compared to reducing the recognition accuracy based on the deep learning method in RF fingerprint offset, transfer learning dramatically improves the recognition performance and reduces the model training time. Simultaneously, the experimental process is in a natural wireless communication environment, and the actual application has high reliability.

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification aims to identify emitters by extracting the inherent physical-layer features. Despite the significant accuracy achieved in a supervised learning manner, few works have focused on unsupervised RFF identification. To this end, we propose an unsupervised training paradigm based on the curriculum learning framework. Specifically, the unlabeled samples are first sorted by the signal-to-noise (SNR) of signals. Then, the network is pretrained with contrastive learning on the high SNR subset. To further improve identification performance, the model is gradually optimized from the easy (high SNR) to the hard (low SNR) subsets with pseudo label learning. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves comparable performance against schemes based on supervised learning.

With the development of the Internet of Things, more and more devices need to be connected to the network. Wireless networks are open, and the network security of devices faces major challenges. The problem of device identification is particularly important. Some traditional signal source marking methods have greatly reduced reliability. The traditional authentication methods mainly rely on software addresses. The radio frequency(RF) fingerprint technology is an emerging device authentication technology, which identifies the device based on the inherent hardware defects of the device itself. The RF fingerprints reflect the inherent characteristics of the device and are difficult to tamper with. In this paper, we proposed an environment invariant feature extraction algorithm based on the cumulative distance. The experiments show that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good robustness. Within the allowable error range, the extracted RF fingerprint features of the same signal in different frequencies, different receivers, and different environments are invariant.KeywordsMarking methodsRF fingerprintI/Q data

Adversarial attacks and active defense on deep learning based identification of GaN power amplifiers under physical perturbation

Privacy breaches and online frauds are grave concerns in pervasive computing. Device identification is the first line of defense to detect and stop fraud. Conventional device authentication schemes using software addresses as identities or static pre-programmed secret keys are vulnerable to tampering and memory attacks. This article reviews two emerging lightweight hardware-oriented solutions to avoid these problems, namely radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification and physical unclonable function (PUF) authentication. Their operating principles and protocols are first introduced, followed by a scrutiny of their common and distinctive features, and a discussion of the stumbling blocks in the way of their market adoption. Finally, we envisage a combined mutual authentication and key establishment scheme to shed light on their synergy.

Radio frequency fingerprint recognition method based on prior information

A frequency-domain cepstrum correlation and temporal transient filtered radio frequency fingerprints (RFF) blind extraction method is proposed for long term evolution uplink device authentication in this work. With the merits of the constant-modulus nature of the Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequence and the cyclic prefix (CP) structure of the physical random access channel (PRACH) frame, the device RFF integrated in both the frequency-domain ZC sequence and the transient ramp-on/ramp-off sequences are extracted. For the frequency-domain RFF extraction, the cepstrum of the ZC sequence is calculated to enlarge the gap between the constant RFF and the random fading effects, and the correlation between two cepstrum fragments is then calculated to mitigate the random fading components. For the temporal RFF extraction, the ramp-on and ramp-off features induced by the device-specific power amplifier are extracted by exploiting the CP structure of the PRACH frame, where the CP part and the duplicate part are adaptively filtered and the final adapted weight of the least mean square filter is used as RFF. No prior PRACH parameter knowledge is required in RFF extraction and both the frequency-domain and the temporal RFF are combined as the input of the convolutional neural network to enhance the classification accuracy. With four-months sampling of PRACH signals emitted from universal software radio peripheral devices, the experimental results show that the authentication accuracy of the proposed combined RFF can reach as high as 99.9% in the line-of-sight (LOS) scenario and 99.6% in the non-LOS scenario.

The security of ultra‐low‐power Internet of Things (IoT) systems is critical yet challenging due to significant energy constraints. These networks are vulnerable to impersonation and data poisoning attacks, where malicious entities can mimic legitimate devices to gain access or corrupt system integrity. While traditional cryptographic solutions are often too energy‐intensive for these environments, radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting offers a promising physical layer security alternative by using intrinsic hardware imperfections to uniquely identify devices. However, existing RF fingerprinting methods often overlook the severe energy budgets of battery‐powered IoT devices. To address this challenge, this paper introduces two complementary deep learning models for device identification in long range wide area network systems. The first, RFNet, is a full‐capacity convolutional neural network that achieves 97.48% identification accuracy. The second, TinyRFNet, is an ultra‐lightweight model designed for resource‐constrained hardware, maintaining 93.19% accuracy with over 34 times fewer parameters than RFNet. We further propose a dynamic, energy‐aware inference strategy that adaptively selects between these two models based on the device's remaining battery level, the model's prediction confidence, and the operational context. Extensive experimental evaluation on a dataset of 30 commercial LoRa devices demonstrates that this adaptive approach achieves an overall identification accuracy of 94.54% while reducing energy consumption by 17% compared to exclusively using the high‐accuracy model. This system provides robust protection against physical‐layer threats with minimal energy overhead, thereby extending the operational lifetime of devices in secure, ultra‐low‐power IoT deployments.