Enhancing WiFi CSI Fingerprinting: A Deep Auxiliary Learning Approach

Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting techniques provide a promising supplement to cryptography-based approaches but rely on dedicated equipment to capture in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples, hindering their wide adoption. Recent advances advocate easily obtainable channel state information (CSI) by commercial WiFi devices for lightweight RF fingerprinting, while falling short in addressing the challenges of coarse granularity of CSI measurements in an open-world setting. In this paper, we propose CSI2Q, a novel CSI fingerprinting system that achieves comparable performance to IQ-based approaches. Instead of extracting fingerprints directly from raw CSI measurements, CSI2Q first transforms frequency-domain CSI measurements into time-domain signals that share the same feature space with IQ samples. Then, we employ a deep auxiliary learning strategy to transfer useful knowledge from an IQ fingerprinting model to the CSI counterpart. Finally, the trained CSI model is combined with an OpenMax function to estimate the likelihood of unknown ones. We evaluate CSI2Q on one synthetic CSI dataset involving 85 devices and two real CSI datasets, including 10 and 25 WiFi routers, respectively. Our system achieves accuracy increases of at least 16% on the synthetic CSI dataset, 20% on the in-lab CSI dataset, and 17% on the in-the-wild CSI dataset.