Cross-Layer Device Fingerprinting and Its Applications to Network Security

In this paper, we describe a novel cross-layer fingerprinting approach (CL-FP) that aims at uniquely identifying wireless devices by extracting inherent cross-layer device features based on the requirements of the driving network application(s). We demonstrate how our system can be applied to MAC spoofing detection. Our contributions include: (1) We propose the CL-FP framework and pipeline for detecting MAC spoofing attacks, which, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind; (2) We experimentally confirm theoretical results showing that easier-to-extract FP features can reliably represent harder-to-extract intrinsic physical characteristics of devices; (3) We test and evaluate the performance of the proposed CL-FP approach through simulations in the context of the MAC spoofing detection use case. Our preliminary results show that the proposed CL-FP pipeline provides a lightweight, scalable and reliable end-to-end cross-layer device fingerprinting framework.