Analysis of receiver front end on the performance of RF fingerprinting

Abstract

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is a technique, where a transmitter is identified from its electromagnetic emission. Most existing RF fingerprinting techniques have been evaluated with high-end receivers and promising classification results have been reported in the literature. However, the realization of RF fingerprinting in todays low-end (i.e. low cost) portable devices requires the validation of the existing RF fingerprinting techniques with low-end receivers. This contribution analyzes the performance of RF fingerprinting for low-end receivers. Experiments are performed for three transmitters and signals are captured with one high-end receiver and three low-end receivers using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). It is found that the classification accuracy of RF fingerprinting varies for different low-end receivers. Results show that low-end receivers provide good classification results at high receiver SNR but high receiver SNR is rare in a typical wireless communication environment. Whereas high-end receiver performs well even at low SNR.

Analysis of impersonation attacks on systems using RF fingerprinting and low-end receivers

“…This will further validate the results reported for low-end receivers [20], which is based on three receivers and a dataset of 3600 signals only. The dataset of 490 000 signals captured in the data collection section are used for the baseline analysis.…”

“…• Modulation-based RF fingerprinting is evaluated for multiple low-cost receivers, which further validates the results reported in [20]. The largest data set consisting of 490 000 signals captured with seven identical receivers are used for this analysis.…”

“…Only one receiver was used to achieve a success rate of up to 70%. However, recent research in RF fingerprinting has shown that classification accuracy varies across the low-end receivers for the same set of transmitters [20]. The variance in classification accuracy is due to the inexpensive analog components present in the receiver front-end.…”

“…Recent research in the RF fingerprinting suggests that receivers also have impairments, which affects the classification accuracy [20]. Additionally, different receivers form different RF fingerprint for the same transmitters due to impairments of the receiver front end.…”

Effect of channel impairments on radiometric fingerprinting

“…The Power Spectral Density (PSD) coefficients were extracted from the noisy preamble signals to form the RF fingerprint for each transmitter; classification was then performed using a MultiLayer Perceptron Neural classifier. The details of the hardwares, experimental setup, preamble extraction and RF fingerprints formation can be found in our previous published works [16][17][18][19].…”