Impersonation Attacks on RF Fingerprinting
Saeed Ur Rehman
Supervised by AP Kevin Sowerby
Colin Coghill
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 Traditional Analysis of RF Fingerprinting
High End Receiver setup
Radio Frequency Communication Radio Frequency Communication
Channel Impairments
Receiver Impairments
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?
Experimental Testbed
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Classification Process
Results of one receiver
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Results for four receivers
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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