Wireless local area network cards identification based on transient fingerprinting

This paper proposes a time–frequency‐based fingerprinting identification approach by extracting the transient characterizations regarding highly integrated wireless local area network (WLAN) cards. The transient energy envelope is derived from the slice of spectrogram in the time–frequency domain. Then this transient response is fitted to a polynomial under least square criteria, and the polynomial coefficients are regarded as the feature vector. A data acquisition system has been set up to capture IEEE 802.11b Wi‐Fi (wireless fidelity) signals. The results exhibit an approving distinctiveness of up to 94% to classify different manufactories of WLAN cards and of 78.4% for the WLAN cards of the same manufactory.