Replicating the Signature: Unsupervised Targeted Impersonation Attack on RF Fingerprinting

Abstract

This paper presents a novel impersonation attack framework that aims to fool RF Fingerprinting (RFFP) identification systems by synthesizing signals that replicate the hardware-specific impairments of a target device. Our framework leverages unsupervised learning to enable accurate impairment estimation, combined with signal processing-based generation to synthesize high-fidelity adversarial signals. Unlike prior works that assume full access to the legitimate (victim) RFFP classifier, we consider a more realistic attack strategy where the adversary performs the attack from a completely different transceiver hardware. We further evaluate our proposed attack under realistic and challenging deployment settings, including over-the-air transmission in both Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device testbed demonstrate that our attacks remain highly effective even under severe access constraints, significantly outperforming existing baselines in terms of targeted attack success rates by over 80%. We additionally analyze the effects of cross-domain generalization, signal representation mismatch, and classifier diversity, highlighting the robustness and