Portability of an RF fingerprint of a wireless transmitter

Abstract

In conventional wireless networks, security issues are primarily considered above the physical layer and are usually based on bit-level algorithms to establish the identity of a legitimate wireless device. Physical layer security is a new paradigm in which features extracted from an analog signal can be used to establish the unique identity of a transmitter. Our previous research work into RF fingerprinting has shown that every transmitter has a unique RF fingerprint owing to imperfections in the analog components present in the RF front end. Generally, it is believed that the RF fingerprint of a specific transmitter is same across all receivers. That is, a fingerprint created in one receiver can be transported to another receiver to establish the identity of a transmitter. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, no such example is available in the literature in which an RF fingerprint generated in one receiver is used for identification in other receivers. This paper presents the results of experiments, and analyzing the feasibility of using an universal RF fingerprint of a transmitter for identification across different receivers.