Cross-Receiver Open-Set Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Structure-First Adaptation
arXiv:2607.02567
The paper proposes CRODA-ST, a joint optimization framework that combines discriminative structure anchoring and rejection‑oriented alignment to enable reliable radio‑frequency fingerprint identification across heterogeneous receivers while robustly rejecting unknown rogue transmitters.
Abstract
Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) provides a critical physical-layer security mechanism for dynamic Internet of Things (IoT) and ad hoc networks. However, the decentralized and open nature of these networks imposes two strict deployment criteria: the credential must transfer reliably across physically dispersed, heterogeneous receivers, and it must decisively reject unregistered rogue traffic. Cross-receiver hardware shifts depress the confidence of registered devices and may also place unseen rogue transmitters in high-confidence known regions under naive domain adaptation, increasing false acceptance. To address these risks, we propose CRODA-ST, a joint optimization framework that couples Discriminative Structure Anchoring (DSA) with Rejection Oriented Alignment (ROA). Within this coupled objective, DSA establishes a stable target-known semantic foundation for shifted registered devices, while ROA regularizes the open-set decision boundaries governing rejection of unseen rogue transmitters. In the canonical WiSig setting, CRODA-ST achieves an open-set classification rate (OSCR) of 0.9580 and a target-domain false positive rate of 0.0469 at a 90% true positive rate (FPR90). A controllable LoRa simulation provides a complementary diagnostic under synthesized hardware distortions. At the distinct source-calibrated deployment operating point with rho = 0.80, CRODA-ST yields a target-unknown false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.0075 in the evaluated setting.