Bluetooth devices fingerprinting using low cost SDR

Abstract

Physical fingerprinting is a trending domain in wireless security. Those methods aim at identifying transmitters based on the subtle variations existing in their handling of a communication protocol. They can provide an additional authentication layer, hard to emulate, to improve the security of systems. Software Defined Radios (SDR) are a tool of choice for the fingerprinting, as they virtually enable the analysis of any wireless communication scheme. However, they require expensive computations, and are still complex to handle by newcomers. In this paper, we use low cost SDR to propose a physical-layer fingerprinting approach, that allows recognition of the model of a device performing a Bluetooth scan, with more than 99.8% accuracy in a set of ten devices.