# Radio fingerprinting

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{{More citations needed|date=January 2017}}

'''Radio fingerprinting''' is a process that identifies a [cellular phone](/source/Mobile_phone) or any other radio transmitter by the ''fingerprint'' that characterizes its signal transmission and is hard to imitate. An electronic fingerprint makes it possible to identify a wireless device by its radio [transmission](/source/Transmission_(telecommunications)) characteristics. Radio fingerprinting is commonly used by cellular operators to prevent cloning of cell phones — a cloned device will have the same numeric equipment identity but a different radio fingerprint.

Essentially, each transmitter (cell phones are just one type of radio transmitter) has a [rise time](/source/rise_time) signature when first keyed which is caused by the slight variations of component values during manufacture. Once the rise time signature is captured and assigned to a callsign, the use of a different transmitter using the same callsign is easily detected. Such systems are used in military signals intelligence and by radio regulatory agencies such as the U.S. [Federal Communications Commission](/source/Federal_Communications_Commission) (FCC) for identifying illegal transmitters. They are also used for assessing usage for billing purposes in [Subscriber Mobile Radio](/source/Subscriber_Mobile_Radio) (SMR) systems.

This topic has garnered great attention in recent years as the radio fingerprinting technique offers a "physical layer" authentication solution, which can provide fundamentally superior performance than traditional higher-layer encryption solutions. The topic has been studied by various researchers across multiple disciplines, including Signal Processing, Antenna and Propagation and Computer Science.
<ref>{{cite book |last1=Brik |first1=Vladimir |last2=Banerjee |first2=Suman |last3=Gruteser |first3=Marco |last4=Oh |first4=Sangho |title=Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking |chapter=Wireless device identification with radiometric signatures |date=14 September 2008 |pages=116–127 |doi=10.1145/1409944.1409959 |isbn=9781605580968 |s2cid=8960221 |chapter-url=https://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~gruteser/papers/brik_paradis.pdf |access-date=1 March 2023}}</ref>
<ref>{{Cite journal |doi = 10.1145/3428329 |year = 2020|last1 = Abanto|first1 = Luis|last2 = Bäuml|first2 = Andreas |last3 = Sim|first3 = Allyson |last4 = Hollick|first4 = Matthias|last5 = Asadi|first5 = Arash | title=Stay Connected, Leave no Trace: Enhancing Security and Privacy in WiFi via Obfuscating Radiometric Fingerprints | journal=Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems |volume = 6|issue = 4|pages = 1346–1354|arxiv = 2011.12644| s2cid=227162019 }}</ref>
<ref>{{Cite journal |doi = 10.1109/TIFS.2011.2162949|title = Improved Radiometric Identification of Wireless Devices Using MIMO Transmission|year = 2011|last1 = Shi|first1 = Yan|last2 = Jensen|first2 = Michael A.|journal = IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security|volume = 6|issue = 4|pages = 1346–1354| s2cid=16696253 }}</ref>

==References==
{{Reflist}}

Category:Automatic identification and data capture
Category:Radio-frequency identification
Category:Radio
Category:Mobile telecommunications
Category:Measurement and signature intelligence

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Radio fingerprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_fingerprinting) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_fingerprinting?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.