SinFormer: A Tailored Transformer for Robust Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification

Abstract: With the rapid proliferation of wireless and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, ensuring secure and reliable device identification has become a significant challenge. Traditional security techniques, such as IP or MAC address-based authentication, are susceptible to spoofing, whereas Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) offers a more secure alternative by exploiting the unique hardware imperfections in devices' RF signals. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for RFFI that enhances both accuracy and reliability in challenging RF environments. The core of our approach is the Signal Inception Transformer (SinFormer), which leverages a specialized multi-scale self-attention mechanism to effectively capture both large-scale and fine-grained fingerprints in signals, significantly improving identification accuracy. To further enhance robustness and reliability, we introduce a two-stage training strategy that enables the model to learn general signal features and maintain performance under adverse conditions, such as low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) or channel variations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using a real-world dataset. Experimental results show that the SinFormer framework consistently outperforms existing methods in accuracy and robustness across diverse and challenging scenarios.