SignCRF: Scalable Channel-Agnostic Data-Driven Radio Authentication System
Amani Al-Shawabka, Philip J. Pietraski, Sudhir B Pattar, Pedram Johari, Tommaso Melodia · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
Radio Frequency Fingerprinting through Deep Learning (RFFDL) is a data-driven IoT authentication technique that leverages the unique hardware-level manufacturing imperfections associated with a particular device to recognize (“fingerprint”) the device itself based on variations introduced in the transmitted waveform. Key impediments in developing robust and scalable RFFDL techniques that are practical in dynamic and mobile environments are the non-stationary behavior of the wireless channel and other impairments introduced by the propagation conditions. To date, the existing RFFDL-based techniques have only been able to demonstrate a desirable performance when the training and testing environment remains the same, which makes the solutions impractical.SignCRFbrings to the RFFDL landscape what it has been missing so far: a scalable, channel-agnostic data-driven radio authentication platform with unmatched precision in fingerprinting wireless devices based on their unique manufacturing impairments that isindependent of the dynamic nature of the environment or channel irregularities caused by mobility.SignCRFconsists of: (i) a classifier developed in a base-environment with minimum channel dynamics, and finely trained to authenticate devices with high accuracy and at scale; (ii) an environment translator that is carefully designed and trained to remove the dynamic channel impact from RF signals while maintaining the radio's specific “signature”; and (iii) a Max Rule module that selects the highest precision authentication technique between the baseline classifier and the environment translator per radio. We design, train, and validate the performance ofSignCRFfor multiple technologies in dynamic environments and at scale (100 LoRa and 20 WiFi devices, the largest datasets available in the literature). We assess the scalability ofSignCRFacross various testbed scales by validating our system using small, medium, and large-scale testbeds, with sizes of 5, 20, and 100 devices, respectively. We demonstrate thatSignCRFcan significantly improve the RFFDL performance by achieving as high as 100% correct authentication for WiFi devices and 80% correctly authenticated LoRa devices, a 5x and 8x improvement when compared to the state-of-the-art respectively. Furthermore, we show thatSignCRFis resilient to adversarial actions by reducing the device recognition accuracy from 73% to 6%, which translates into zero mis-authentication of adversary radios that try to impersonate legitimate devices, which has not been achieved by any prior RFFDL techniques.