CQP-RFFI: Injecting a Communication-Quality Preserving RF Fingerprint for Wi-Fi Device Identification

Recently, there has been an emerging radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) technology that enhances fingerprint distinguishability by deliberately injecting I/Q imbalance into the device’s Wi-Fi baseband signal. Due to the additional injection of I/Q imbalance, this approach inevitably impacts the communication quality between devices, as it reduces the accuracy of channel estimation. To address this issue, we propose injecting the I/Q imbalance into a short training field (STF) instead of the entire baseband signal. Our findings indicate that this method can effectively preserve the quality of the original wireless communication. Building upon this, we introduce a fingerprinting scheme called CQP-RFFI that generates distinguishable fingerprints for a set of devices by injecting appropriate I/Q imbalance into the STF. Leveraging the short-term invariance of the channel, we design a practical I/Q imbalance extraction method based on the communication-quality preserving injection. Moreover, we design an optimal assignment method for I/Q imbalance to maximize the distinguishability of RF fingerprints for all devices. Finally, we implement the CQP-RFFI solution and conduct experiments in real-world scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that CQP-RFFI achieves 96% precision, recall, and F1-score, and can consistently maintain good communication quality.