Chaotic Radio Frequency Fingerprint Masking Against Identity Attacks

Radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) authentication is promising for physical-layer hardware identification. However, RFF identities exposed to public channels are easily susceptible to fake identification attacks. To render the unique RFF features inaccessible to unauthorized devices, we propose an active security approach based on chaotic fingerprints, which can generate 10320 chaotic fingerprints against the active identification attacks using fake RFF hardware identities. The proposed scheme is experimentally demonstrated, dramatically reducing the recognition accuracy (RA) to <11% for the unauthorized users, while the success rate (SR) of RFF forgery attacks is reduced to <9%. Instead, an RA >90% at 20dB is feasible for the authorized devices, which implies the successful recovery of the original RFF. The proposed chaotic RFF significantly enhances the high security level of identity authentication for wireless communications.