Wireless device identification with radiometric signatures

Abstract

We design, implement, and evaluate a technique to identify the source network interface card (NIC) of an IEEE 802.11 frame through passive radio-frequency analysis. This technique, called PARADIS, leverages minute imperfections of transmitter hardware that are acquired at manufacture and are present even in otherwise identical NICs. These imperfections are transmitter-specific and manifest themselves as artifacts of the emitted signals. In PARADIS, we measure differentiating artifacts of individual wireless frames in the modulation domain, apply suitable machine-learning classification tools to achieve significantly higher degrees of NIC identification accuracy than prior best known schemes.