Towards Scalable and Channel-Robust Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification for LoRa

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) is a promising device authentication technique based on transmitter hardware impairments. The device-specific hardware features can be extracted at the receiver by analyzing the received signal and used for authentication. In this paper, we propose a scalable and channel-robust RFFI framework achieved by deep learning powered radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) extractor and channel independent features. Specifically, we leverage deep metric learning to train an RFF extractor, which has excellent generalization ability and can extract RFFs from previously unseen devices. Any devices can be enrolled via the pre-trained RFF extractor and the RFF database can be maintained efficiently for allowing devices to join and leave. Wireless channel impacts the RFF extraction and is tackled by exploiting channel independent features and data augmentation. We carried out extensive experimental evaluation involving 60 commercial off-the-shelf LoRa devices and a USRP N210 software defined radio platform. The results have successfully demonstrated that our framework can achieve excellent generalization abilities for rogue device detection and device classification as well as effective channel mitigation.

Automated summary

This paper presents a device authentication technique called Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) based on transmitter hardware impairments. The proposed framework uses a deep learning-powered RFF extractor and channel independent features for scalable and channel-robust authentication.