AUTHFi: Cross-Technology Device Authentication via Commodity WiFi

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has dramatically increased the demand for secure mechanisms to protect against unauthorized access and attacks. Traditionally, expensive Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) have been utilized to gather IoT physical features, which are critical for reliable authentication. However, the high cost of SDRs makes them impractical for widespread deployment across the vast and diverse IoT ecosystem. In contrast, this paper presents AUTHFi, a novel cross-technology device authentication framework that transforms the SDR approach for collecting and authenticating IoT device signals (e.g., ZigBee and Bluetooth) by utilizing commercial WiFi devices. Specifically, AUTHFi leverages the recent advances in Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) to reconstruct the partial waveform of IoT transmission, thus eliminating the requirement for expensive SDRs. AUTHFi requires us to address several unique challenges. First, AUTHFi compensates for signal losses of the partial waveform to get more signal information. Then, it introduces an enhanced Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) estimation and a fusion neural network that combines CFO and the reconstructed waveform for accurate device authentication. We implement AUTHFi based on RTL8812au (commodity WiFi) and CC2652P (commodity ZigBee/Bluetooth). Our thorough evaluation confirms that AUTHFi offers reliable authentication under various settings, achieving a maximum accuracy of 94.2%. © 2025 IEEE.