Speaker: Brian Sadler (Army Research Laboratory)

Title: Fingerpinting By Design: Authentication and Security

Abstract: Fingerprints are commonly understood as traits that uniquely identify an individual, an object, or a message, and can be exploited to detect and prevent impersonation, fraud, or unlawful duplication. In this talk we consider the intentional introduction of fingerprints to provide security in wireless communications. This addresses the fingerprint design, and its embedding into a communications waveform, so that it has several desired properties including stealth, security, and predictable performance. The framework draws on communications, signal processing, cryptographic hashing, and information theory, enabling control of performance trade-offs by design. Privacy and security analysis quantify the limited ability of an eavesdropper to detect and estimate the fingerprint or to impersonate a legitimate user. Fingerprints provide a message, and a secret codebook design is described that enables secure side-channel communications through fingerprint coding.