Impersonation Attacks on RF Fingerprinting

Saeed Ur Rehman Supervised by

AP Kevin SowerbyColin Coghill

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Outline

Radio Frequency (RF) Fingerprinting Research gaps Objective Experiment setup Results Conclusion

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RF Fingerprinting

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is the process of identifying a radio transmitter by the unique features present in its analog waveform.

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Traditional Analysis of RF Fingerprinting

High End Receiver setup

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Radio Frequency Communication

Channel Impairments

Receiver Impairments

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Research Gaps in RF Fingerprinting

Analog components at the receiver front-end also have impairments.

Channel impairments further distorts the unique RF features of the transmitter

How secure and robust RF fingerprinting is to impersonation attack?

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Research Objective

How secure and robust RF fingerprinting is to impersonation attack using a low-end receiver?

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Experimental Testbed

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Classification Process

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Results of one receiver

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Results for four receivers

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Conclusion

An attacker (malicious user) would be unaware of the impairments of a legitimate receiver. More importantly, the attacker would probably also be unaware of its own receiver impairments (which influence the fingerprint it creates for a target transmitter) and its transmitter impairments.

Therefore, the uncertainty associated with low end hardware increases the challenge for the attacker to create a signal that would deceive a legitimate user.

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Questions ?