Fingerprinting far proximity from radio emissions

Abstract

As wireless mobile devices are more and more pervasive and adopted in critical applications, it is becoming increasingly important to measure the physical proximity of these devices in a secure way. Although various techniques have been developed to identify whether a device is close, the problem of identifying the far proximity (i.e., a target is at least a certain distance away) has been neglected by the research community. Meanwhile, verifying the far proximity is desirable and critical to enhance the security of emerging wireless applications. In this paper, we propose a secure far proximity identification approach that determines whether or not a remote device is far away. The key idea of the proposed approach is to estimate the far proximity from the unforgeable "fingerprint" of the proximity. We have validated and evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed far proximity identification method through experiments on real measured channel data. The experiment results show that the proposed approach can detect the far proximity with a successful rate of 0.85 for the non-Line-of-sight (NLoS) scenario, and the successful rate can be further increased to 0.99 for the Line-of-sight (LoS) scenario. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.