IoT Devices Security Using RF Fingerprinting

Internet of Things (IoT) devices industry is rapidly growing, with an accelerated increase in the list of manufacturers offering a wide range of smart devices selected to enhance end-users' standard of living. Security remains an after-thought in these devices resulting in vulnerabilities. While there exists a cryptographic protocol designed to solve such authentication problem, the computational complexity of cryptographic protocols and scalability problems make almost all cryptography-based authentication protocols impractical for IoT. Wireless RFF (Radio Frequency Fingerprinting) comes as a physical layer-based security authentication method that improves wireless security authentication, which is especially useful for the power and computing limited devices. As a proof-of-concept, this paper proposes a universal SDR (software defined Radio)-based inexpensive implementation intended to sense emitted wireless signals from IoT devices. Our approach is validated by extracting mobile phone signal bursts under different user-dedicated modes. The proposed setup is well adapted to accurately capture signals from different telecommunication standards. To ensure a unique identification of IoT devices, this paper also provides an optimum set of features useful to generate the device identity fingerprint.