A Review of Radio Frequency Fingerprinting Techniques

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting techniques have been used as an extra security layer for wireless devices. Unique fingerprints are used to identify wireless devices in order to avoid spoofing or impersonating attacks. These unique features can be extracted from imperfections of analog components during the manufacturing. This paper presents a general review of recent progress on RF fingerprinting techniques. Several studies are investigated for RF fingerprinting using different parts of a signal. The majority of these studies have been focused on the transient part of the signal. For this purpose, the transient signal must be extracted precisely. A number of common techniques of transient extraction are theoretically analyzed in this review. Then, some other approaches using the modulated part of the signal are also discussed. For all these approaches, the applied methodologies, the classification algorithms and a taxonomy of features are described. A comprehensive overview of the methods in RF fingerprinting is presented to demonstrate the state-of-the-art works.