Fighting Fire with Fire: Channel-Independent RF Fingerprinting via the Ratio of Linear to Logarithmic Differential Spectrum

Eliminating the influence of temporally varying channel components on the radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) extraction has been an enduring and challenging issue. To overcome this problem, we propose a channel-independent RFF extraction method inspired by the idea of 'fighting fire with fire'. Specifically, we derive the linear differential spectrum and the logarithmic differential spectrum of the channel frequency responses (CFRs) from the received signals at different times, and then calculate the ratio of the two spectrums. It is found that the division operation effectively counteracts the channel effects, while simultaneously preserving the integrity of the RFFs. Our experiments on LTE-V2X, LoRa and Wi-Fi devices show that the proposed method achieves an average identification accuracy exceeding 95% across various environments.

Radio Frequency Fingerprints Extraction for LTE-V2X: A Channel Estimation Based Methodology

The vehicular-to-everything (V2X) technology has recently drawn a number of attentions from both academic and industrial areas. However, the openness of the wireless communication system makes it more vulnerable to identity impersonation and information tampering. How to employ the powerful radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification technology in V2X systems turns out to be a vital and also challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel RFF extraction method for Long Term Evolution-V2X (LTE-V2X) systems. In order to conquer the difficulty of extracting transmitter RFF in the presence of wireless channel and receiver noise, we first estimate the wireless channel which excludes the RFF. Then, we remove the impact of the wireless channel based on the channel estimate and obtain initial RFF features. Finally, we conduct RFF denoising to enhance the quality of the initial RFF. Simulation and experiment results both demonstrate that our proposed RFF extraction scheme achieves a high identification accuracy. Furthermore, the performance is also robust to the vehicle speed.