Information Bottleneck-Driven Cross-Receiver RF Fingerprinting for Physical-Layer Security

This research paper presents a new method for radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF, a technique that identifies wireless devices by analyzing unique hardware distortions in their signals) that works better when signals are received by different types of receivers. The proposed approach uses an information bottleneck (IB, a principle that keeps only the most important information while removing unnecessary details) to learn compact representations of device fingerprints without needing labeled data about which receiver collected the signal, outperforming existing methods on real-world datasets.