Physical Layer-Based Device Fingerprinting for Wireless Security: From Theory to Practice

TL;DR

This paper surveys physical layer-based device fingerprinting techniques for wireless security, emphasizing hardware impairments and channel features, highlighting their practicality for IoT devices, and discussing future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of hardware impairment and channel feature-based device fingerprinting methods, focusing on their application to IoT security and passive authentication techniques.

Findings

Passive techniques are suitable for legacy IoT devices.

Hardware and channel features enable device identification without cryptography.

Remaining challenges include robustness and scalability.

Abstract

The identification of the devices from which a message is received is part of security mechanisms to ensure authentication in wireless communications. Conventional authentication approaches are cryptography-based, which, however, are usually computationally expensive and not adequate in the Internet of Things (IoT), where devices tend to be low-cost and with limited resources. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of physical layer-based device fingerprinting, which is an emerging device authentication for wireless security. In particular, this article focuses on hardware impairment-based identity authentication and channel features-based authentication. They are passive techniques that are readily applicable to legacy IoT devices. Their intrinsic hardware and channel features, algorithm design methodologies, application scenarios, and key research questions are extensively reviewed here. The remaining research challenges are discussed, and future work is suggested that can further enhance the physical layer-based device fingerprinting.