A Novel Physical Spoofing Technique Using Radio Frequency Fingerprint Emulation and Model Fitting

With the increasing demand for secure communication in 5G and beyond, authentication of wireless devices has become a crucial task for communication security. Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) leverages the hardware-specific features in radio frequency (RF) signals, known as radio frequency fingerprints (RFF), to achieve highprecision device identification. However, the dependence of RFFI on the physical characteristics of devices makes it vulnerable to physical spoofing attacks. This paper proposes an innovative physical spoofing attack framework that combines spoofed transmitter and legitimate transmitter models. It performs RFF modeling, RFF concealment (RFFC), and RFF spoofing (RFFS) sequentially to achieve precise spoofing of the original baseband signal. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed physical spoofing mechanism through simulations of seven types of transmitters using MATLAB Simulink. The performance is further evaluated on an RFFI model based on complexvalued convolutional neural networks (CVCNN). Experimental results show that neural networks (NN) significantly outperform the generalized memory polynomial (GMP) model in nonlinear data fitting and temporal relationship modeling. Consequently, NN-based physical spoofing methods exhibit superior attack effectiveness. Specifically, under the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 15 dB, the NN-based physical spoofing method achieves a target attack success rate (TSR) as high as 98%, which is superior to adversarial attack methods. NN-based methods also enhanced performance in terms of stealthiness metrics.