Analysis of Impersonation Attack on RF Fingerprinting

Abstract

Radio Frequency (RF) Fingerprinting Research gaps Objective Experiment setup Results Conclusion Radio fingerprinting is the process of identifying a radio transmitter by the unique characteristics present in its signal. This unique characteristics are due to the imperfections of the analog components present in the transmitter chain. RF fingerprinting is considered a secure and robust technique. However there has been very little reported investigation of the actual performance and robustness of RF fingerprinting techniques in the presence of a malicious user. The two known examples in the literature have shown that modulation-based RF fingerprinting can be easily impersonated with an accuracy of up to 100% while transient based RF fingerprinting is resilient to impersonation attack. However, the analysis was performed with only one high-end receiver and results were not validated with multiple receivers.