Tracking UWB Devices Through Radio Frequency Fingerprinting Is Possible
This addresses security and privacy concerns for smartphone users by demonstrating that UWB devices can be tracked, but the results are incremental as they build on existing RFF techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of applying Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) to Ultra-wideband (UWB) devices to assess tracking feasibility, achieving over 99% accuracy in stable conditions and up to 76% accuracy in untrained locations.
Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a state-of-the-art technology designed for applications requiring centimeter-level localization. Its widespread adoption by smartphone manufacturer naturally raises security and privacy concerns. Successfully implementing Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) to UWB could enable physical layer security, but might also allow undesired tracking of the devices. The scope of this paper is to explore the feasibility of applying RFF to UWB and investigates how well this technique generalizes across different environments. We collected a realistic dataset using off-the-shelf UWB devices with controlled variation in device positioning. Moreover, we developed an improved deep learning pipeline to extract the hardware signature from the signal data. In stable conditions, the extracted RFF achieves over 99% accuracy. While the accuracy decreases in more changing environments, we still obtain up to 76% accuracy in untrained locations.