The Day-After-Tomorrow: On the Performance of Radio Fingerprinting over Time

The performance of Radio Frequency (RF) Fingerprinting (RFF) techniques is negatively impacted when the training data is not temporally close to the testing data. This can limit the practical implementation of physical-layer authentication solutions. To circumvent this problem, current solutions involve collecting training and testing datasets at close time intervals - this being detrimental to the real-life deployment of any physical-layer authentication solution. We refer to this issue as the Day-After-Tomorrow (DAT) effect, being widely attributed to the temporal variability of the wireless channel, which masks the physical-layer features of the transmitter, thus impairing the fingerprinting process. In this work, we investigate the DAT effect shedding light on its root causes. Our results refute previous knowledge by demonstrating that the DAT effect is not solely caused by the variability of the wireless channel. Instead, we prove that it is also due to the power cycling of the radios, i.e., the turning off and on of the radios between the collection of training and testing data. We show that state-of-the-art RFF solutions double their performance when the devices under test are not power cycled, i.e., the accuracy increases from about 0.5 to about 1 in a controlled scenario. Finally, we show how to mitigate the DAT effect in real-world scenarios, through pre-processing of the I-Q samples. Our experimental results show a significant improvement in accuracy, from approximately 0.45 to 0.85. Additionally, we reduce the variance of the results, making the overall performance more reliable.</p

Challenges of Radio Frequency Fingerprinting: From Data Collection to Deployment

Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) techniques promise to authenticate wireless devices at the physical layer based on inherent hardware imperfections introduced during manufacturing. Such RF transmitter imperfections are reflected into over-the-air signals, allowing receivers to accurately identify the RF transmitting source. Recent advances in Machine Learning, particularly in Deep Learning (DL), have improved the ability of RFF systems to extract and learn complex features that make up the device-specific fingerprint. However, integrating DL techniques with RFF and operating the system in real-world scenarios presents numerous challenges. This article identifies and analyzes these challenges while considering the three reference phases of any DL-based RFF system: (i) data collection and preprocessing, (ii) training, and finally, (iii) deployment. Our investigation points out the current open problems that prevent real deployment of RFF while discussing promising future directions, thus paving the way for further research in the area.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table, and 4 figure

A Dataset of physical-layer measurements in indoor wireless jamming scenarios

The broadcast nature of wireless communications makes them vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Indeed, an adversary can prevent the reception of wireless messages by transmitting signals with high power over the same frequency of the considered channel. This paper presents an experimental dataset of real-world indoor communication scenarios affected by different jamming techniques. Specifically, our dataset includes data acquired from 7 different Software Defined Radios (SDRs), i.e., the USRP Ettus Research X310, operating in an office environment. Each experiment is characterized by a transmitter, a receiver, and a jammer. While the hardware of the transmitter and the receiver are kept the same for all the experiments, the hardware of the jammer is changed adopting 5 different radios of the same brand. The dataset includes different jamming behaviors, based on the type of signal injected by the jammer: no jamming (silent), tone (sinusoidal), and Gaussian noise. Moreover, besides having multiple jamming devices and modes, the dataset also includes different transmission distances and jamming powers. In each experiment, a pre-determined sequence of bits has been modulated using the BPSK scheme, transmitted wirelessly under different jamming conditions, and then stored, at the receiver, as a 2-columns matrix of I/Q samples. Researchers can use this dataset in several ways, including: (i) developing active and reactive techniques for jamming detection, (ii) jamming identification at the physical layer, and finally, (iii) developing mitigation techniques supported by real data

A Dataset of IQ samples in Indoor Jamming Scenarios

This dataset includes physical-layer radio information (IQ samples) acquired from indoor communications affected by different types of jamming techniques. Specifically, it includes data acquired from 7 different Software Defined Radios (SDRs), i.e., the USRP Ettus Research X310, operating in an office environment while the transmitter and receiver communicates without the Line of Sight (nLoS). Each experiment is characterized by a transmitter, a receiver, and a jammer. While the hardware of the transmitter and the receiver are kept the same for all the experiments, the hardware of the jammer is changed adopting 5 different radios of the same model and brand. The dataset includes different jamming types, e.g., no jamming (silent), tone (sinusoidal), and Gaussian noise. Moreover, the dataset includes different transmission distances and jamming power levels. In each experiment, a pre-determined sequence of bits ([0, 255]) has been modulated using the BPSK scheme, and then stored, at the receiver, as a 2-columns matrix of raw I/Q samples