SecurityHub: Electromagnetic Fingerprinting USB Peripherals using Backscatter-assisted Commodity Hardware

In this paper, we propose an innovative method for fingerprinting USB peripherals. While USB technology has made significant progress in data transfer efficiency, by default, the USB host device trusts any connected peripherals. This ignorance has led to several security risks in practice. Existing protection practices mitigate these risks by verifying the specific type or even the identity of the peripheral before data transfer. However, these methods often depend on expensive and specialized hardware, such as software-defined radios, limiting their applicability in everyday scenarios.To address this issue, we propose profiling the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) generated by a USB peripheral as its unique identifier. Our method utilizes a low-cost backscatter unit and the host’s WiFi network card for the profiling and verification process. The backscatter unit is integrated into a USB hub. It shifts the USB EMR signal into the frequency domain within the WiFi sensing range, and transforms EMR into an interpretable form suitable for feature extraction. Subsequently, we employ a hybrid classification method, combining heuristic and neural network clues, to recognize the identity of the EMR’s source. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on an extensive dataset collected from USB peripherals of various types and vendors.