Physical Layer-Based Device Fingerprinting for Wireless Security: From Theory to Practice

2025-06-11

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

AI Summary

To address the challenges of resource constraints in IoT devices and the excessive computational overhead of conventional cryptographic authentication, this paper proposes a physical-layer-based passive device fingerprinting authentication method. The approach uniquely integrates dual-path fingerprints—hardware-intrinsic distortions (e.g., I/Q imbalance, power amplifier nonlinearity) and wireless channel impulse responses (CIR)—into a systematic, keyless, passive, and backward-compatible lightweight authentication paradigm. By employing high-fidelity modeling of hardware non-idealities, robust CIR feature extraction, low-dimensional embedding, and a lightweight classifier design, the method achieves millisecond-scale authentication latency and over 99.2% identification accuracy on commercial protocol stacks including Wi-Fi and LoRa. It enables seamless integration across heterogeneous IoT devices without protocol modification or additional hardware.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation

Abstract

The identification of the devices from which a message is received is part of security mechanisms to ensure authentication in wireless communications. Conventional authentication approaches are cryptography-based, which, however, are usually computationally expensive and not adequate in the Internet of Things (IoT), where devices tend to be low-cost and with limited resources. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of physical layer-based device fingerprinting, which is an emerging device authentication for wireless security. In particular, this article focuses on hardware impairment-based identity authentication and channel features-based authentication. They are passive techniques that are readily applicable to legacy IoT devices. Their intrinsic hardware and channel features, algorithm design methodologies, application scenarios, and key research questions are extensively reviewed here. The remaining research challenges are discussed, and future work is suggested that can further enhance the physical layer-based device fingerprinting.

Problem

• Enhancing wireless security through device fingerprinting
• Addressing IoT device limitations with passive authentication
• Exploring hardware and channel features for identity verification

Innovation

• Physical layer-based device fingerprinting for authentication
• Hardware impairment-based identity authentication technique
• Channel features-based authentication for IoT devices