HEEDFUL: Leveraging Sequential Transfer Learning for Robust WiFi Device Fingerprinting Amid Hardware Warm-Up Effects

TL;DR

HEEDFUL introduces a sequential transfer learning framework that significantly improves WiFi device fingerprinting accuracy during hardware warm-up phases, addressing a key challenge in practical RF identification applications.

Contribution

This work presents HEEDFUL, a novel approach leveraging sequential transfer learning and hardware impairment estimation to enhance RF fingerprinting robustness during device warm-up.

Findings

Achieves up to 96% classification accuracy during initial device operation

Outperforms traditional models in cross-day and cross-protocol tests

Provides new RF fingerprint datasets with hardware impairment data

Abstract

Deep Learning-based RF fingerprinting approaches struggle to perform well in cross-domain scenarios, particularly during hardware warm-up. This often-overlooked vulnerability has been jeopardizing their reliability and their adoption in practical settings. To address this critical gap, in this work, we first dive deep into the anatomy of RF fingerprints, revealing insights into the temporal fingerprinting variations during and post hardware stabilization. Introducing HEEDFUL, a novel framework harnessing sequential transfer learning and targeted impairment estimation, we then address these challenges with remarkable consistency, eliminating blind spots even during challenging warm-up phases. Our evaluation showcases HEEDFUL's efficacy, achieving remarkable classification accuracies of up to 96% during the initial device operation intervals-far surpassing traditional models. Furthermore, cross-day and cross-protocol assessments confirm HEEDFUL's superiority, achieving and maintaining high accuracy during both the stable and initial warm-up phases when tested on WiFi signals. Additionally, we release WiFi type B and N RF fingerprint datasets that, for the first time, incorporate both the time-domain representation and real hardware impairments of the frames. This underscores the importance of leveraging hardware impairment data, enabling a deeper understanding of fingerprints and facilitating the development of more robust RF fingerprinting solutions.