Radio fingerprinting is a process that identifies a

cellular phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...

or any other radio transmitter by the "fingerprint" that characterizes its

signal In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...

transmission and is hard to imitate. An electronic fingerprint makes it possible to identify a wireless device by its radio

transmission Transmission may refer to: Medicine, science and technology * Power transmission ** Electric power transmission ** Propulsion transmission, technology allowing controlled application of power *** Automatic transmission *** Manual transmission *** ...

characteristics. Radio fingerprinting is commonly used by cellular operators to prevent cloning of cell phones — a cloned device will have the same numeric equipment identity but a different radio fingerprint. Essentially, each transmitter (cell phones are just one type of radio transmitter) has a

rise time In electronics, when describing a voltage or current step function, rise time is the time taken by a signal to change from a specified low value to a specified high value. These values may be expressed as ratiosSee for example , and . or, equivale ...

signature when first keyed which is caused by the slight variations of component values during manufacture. Once the rise time signature is captured and assigned to a callsign, the use of a different transmitter using the same callsign is easily detected. Such systems are used in military signals intelligence and by radio regulatory agencies such as the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...

(FCC) for identifying illegal transmitters. They are also used for assessing usage for billing purposes in

Subscriber Mobile Radio The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, and ...

(SMR) systems. This topic has garnered great attention in recent years as the radio fingerprinting technique offers a "physical layer" authentication solution, which can provide fundamentally superior performance than traditional higher-layer encryption solutions. The topic has been studied by various researchers across multiple disciplines, including Signal Processing, Antenna and Propagation and Computer Science.

References

{{Reflist Automatic identification and data capture Radio-frequency identification Radio Mobile telecommunications Measurement and signature intelligence