A Deep Learning Approach to IoT Authentication

At its peak, the Internet-of-Things will largely be composed of low-power devices with wireless radios attached. Yet, secure authentication of these devices amidst adversaries with much higher power and computational capability remains a challenge, even for advanced cryptographic and wireless security protocols. For instance, a high-power software radio could simply replay chunks of signals from a low-power device to emulate it. This paper presents a deep-learning classifier that learns hardware imperfections of low-power radios that are challenging to emulate, even for high- power adversaries. We build an LSTM framework, specifically sensitive to signal imperfections that persist over long durations. Experimental results from a testbed of 30 low-power nodes demonstrate high resilience to advanced software radio adversaries.