Using Near-Field Electromagnetic Side Channels for Efficiently Fingerprinting Wireless Modules

We introduce a fingerprinting method for wireless transceivers based on near-field electromagnetic (EM) side-channel measurements. The fingerprints are obtained from measured EM signals emitted by mixed-signal circuit operations in integrated wireless modules during reception of beacon frames in the IEEE 802.11n wireless standard. The method can identify 8 Wi -Fi modules with device-dependent features derived from a multi-class linear discriminant analysis classifier. We additionally identify modules measured three weeks after measurements of the training set.