Wireless device authentication using acoustic hardware fingerprints

Abstract

Authentication between wireless devices is critical for many wireless network applications, especially in some secure wireless communication scenarios. One of ingenious solutions is to extract a fingerprint to perform device authentication by exploiting variations in the transmitted signal caused by hardware and manufacturing inconsistencies. In this work, we propose a device identification protocol (named S2M) by leveraging the frequency response of a speaker and a microphone from two wireless devices as an acoustic hardware fingerprint. S2M authenticates the legitimate user based on the results of matching the fingerprint extracted at the learning process with the one extracted at the verification process. We design and implement S2M for both mobile phones and PCs and the extensive experimental results show that S2M achieves both a low false negative rate and a low false positive rate in various of scenarios under different attacks.