A practical radio frequency fingerprinting scheme for mobile phones identification

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) has attracted a remarkable surge of attention to wireless transmitter identification due to the inimitable hardware imperfection. However, most RFF-based schemes devised in controlled environments are unable to reach the claimed performance in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a practical RFF identification method for mobile phones in Global System for Mobile (GSM) system. Specifically, the instantaneous amplitude of near-transient part in normal burst (NB) is regarded as RFF that extracted from up-link communications. In addition, an anomaly filtering and stacking (AFS) method is introduced to obtain stable RFF in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) system. Lastly, the impacts of frequency point and sending power variations on RFF are fully dissected in comparison experiments. Experiments on 10 mobile phones show that the proposed RFF scheme yields 99.17% True Acceptance Rate (TAR) in real wireless environments. Experiments also show that the varying transmission power decreases the accuracy of RFF identification.