Intrinsic Physical-Layer Authentication of Integrated Circuits

Radio-frequency distinct native attribute (RF-DNA) fingerprinting is adapted as a physical-layer technique to improve the security of integrated circuit (IC)-based multifactor authentication systems. Device recognition tasks (both identification and verification) are accomplished by passively monitoring and exploiting the intrinsic features of an IC´s unintentional RF emissions without requiring any modification to the device being analyzed. Device discrimination is achieved using RF-DNA fingerprints comprised of higher order statistical features based on instantaneous amplitude, phase, and frequency responses as a device executes a sequence of operations. The recognition system is trained using multiple discriminant analysis to reduce data dimensionality while retaining class separability, and the resultant fingerprints are classified using a linear Bayesian classifier. Demonstrated identification and verification performance includes average identification accuracy of greater than 99.5% and equal error rates of less than 0.05% for 40 near-identical devices. Depending on the level of required classification accuracy, RF-DNA fingerprint-based authentication is well-suited for implementation as a countermeasure to device cloning, and is promising for use in a wide variety of related security problems.