Ethernet card discrimination using unintentional cable emissions and constellation-based fingerprinting

Improved network security is addressed using device dependent physical-layer (PHY) based fingerprints from Ethernet cards to augment traditional MAC-based ID verification. The investigation uses unintentional Ethernet cable emissions and device fingerprints comprised of Constellation-Based, Distinct Native Attribute (CB-DNA) features. Near-field collection probe derivative effects dictated the need for developing a two-dimensional (2D) binary constellation for demodulation and CB-DNA extraction. Results show that the 2D constellation provides reliable demodulation (bit estimation) and device discrimination using symbol cluster statistics for CB-DNA. Bit Error Rate (BER) and Cross-Manufacturer Discrimination (CMD) results are provided for 16 devices from 4 different manufactures. Device discrimination is assessed using both Nearest Neighbor (NN) and Multiple Discriminant Analysis, Maximum Likelihood (MDA/ML) classifiers. Overall results are promising and include CMD average classification accuracy of %C = 76.73% (NN) and %C = 91.38% (MDA/ML).