A Robust Radio-Frequency Fingerprint Extraction Scheme for Practical Device Recognition

Radio-frequency fingerprinting (RFF) exploiting hardware characteristics has been employed for device recognition to enhance the overall security. However, the performance unreliability in long-term experiments, channel fading interference, and unauthorized devices verification are three open problems that restrict the development of RFF recognition. To address these issues, a robust RFF extraction scheme based on three corresponding algorithms is studied. For the first problem, a long-term stacking of repetitive symbols (LSRSs) algorithm is proposed to reduce the acquired signal variance, which contributes to the identification accuracy and long-term stability. For the second issue, we propose an artificial noise adding (ANA) algorithm to enhance the recognition robustness through regularization and channel adaptation. For the third issue, a verification algorithm based on the generative Gaussian probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (GPLDA) model is developed to handle unauthorized devices. Our robust RFF extraction scheme is verified in the experiments with 54 CC2530 ZigBee devices. It enables reliable node identification with the accuracy of 99.50% in the short rang line-of-sight (SLOS) scenarios for signals collected over 18 months, and 95.52% in the extensive multipath fading experiments. The equal error rate (EER) of the verification experiments with six authorized devices versus six unseen unauthorized devices is as low as 0.63%.