Impersonation Attacks on RF Fingerprinting
Saeed Ur Rehman Supervised by
AP Kevin SowerbyColin Coghill
2
Outline
Radio Frequency (RF) Fingerprinting Research gaps Objective Experiment setup Results Conclusion
3
RF Fingerprinting
Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is the process of identifying a radio transmitter by the unique features present in its analog waveform.
6
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?
7
Research Objective
How secure and robust RF fingerprinting is to impersonation attack using a low-end receiver?
12
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.