Physical Layer Authentication and Identification of Wireless Devices Using the Synchrosqueezing Transform

This paper addresses the problem of authentication and identification of wireless devices using their physical properties derived from their Radio Frequency (RF) emissions. This technique is based on the concept that small differences in the physical implementation of wireless devices are significant enough and they are carried over to the RF emissions to distinguish wireless devices with high accuracy. The technique can be used both to authenticate the claimed identity of a wireless device or to identify one wireless device among others. In the literature, this technique has been implemented by feature extraction in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or also in the 2D time frequency domain. This paper describes the novel application of the synchrosqueezing transform to the problem of physical layer authentication. The idea is to exploit the capability of the synchrosqueezing transform to enhance the identification and authentication accuracy of RF devices from their actual wireless emissions. An experimental dataset of 12 cellular communication devices is used to validate the approach and to perform a comparison of the different techniques. The results described in this paper show that the accuracy obtained using 2D Synchrosqueezing Transform (SST) is superior to conventional techniques from the literature based in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or 2D time frequency domain.