FreAuth: Novel Frequency Feature-Based Device Authentication for Magnetic Wireless Charging

Device authentication plays a crucial role in preventing illegal access and ensuring smooth usage of magnetic wireless charging. However, current authentication techniques suffer from security vulnerabilities and are incompatible with low-cost receiver devices, thus severely limiting their applications. In this paper, we propose FreAuth, a novel Frequency feature-based device Authentication technology for magnetic wireless power transfer systems. Technically, we begin by conducting circuit measurements at the transmitter side to subtly retrieve impedance information related to the receiver without the need for its corporation. Then, we employ a dual-frequency interleaved-based subtraction technique to remove the ideal receiver impedance and capture the fairly weak frequency features. Furthermore, we normalize the captured frequency features to account for environment variations. These steps allow us to generate and store a hardware fingerprint for the receiver based on its frequency features. During device authentication, we use a discrete Frechet distance-based algorithm for fingerprint matching. We devise and implement a prototype of FreAuth and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed scheme. The experimental results validate the reliability (95.74% authentication accuracy among 60+ devices) and robustness (anti-interference with device location variations) of our FreAuth. © 2024 IEEE.