Progressive-Observation Physical-Layer Fingerprinting for Efficient Open-Set Ethernet Authentication

Physical-layer fingerprinting (PLF) has emerged as a promising authentication approach for Internet of Things devices. However, most PLF systems acquire and process a fixed-length waveform for every authentication query, burdening resource-constrained edge nodes. To address this issue, we propose a progressive-observation PLF method that adapts the waveform length to each query. Specifically, a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) first rejects clearly unknown devices from a short observation. Spectral matching then accepts clearly registered devices from a slightly longer observation. Only ambiguous queries proceed to the same matching on the full-length waveform, reducing both data acquisition and computation. Because fingerprints drift across days, we also design an adaptive calibration algorithm to avoid retraining the CNN. The algorithm realigns the features and decision thresholds using a few current-day references from registered devices. We evaluate the method with 100BASE-TX Ethernet devices of two controller types on held-out days. Compared with fixed-length processing, it keeps the false rejection and false acceptance rates equal or lower for both controller types on both days. It also reduces the waveform data per query by 75.1% and the CPU processing time on a Raspberry Pi 5 by 73.7% on average. With the same monitoring bandwidth, an edge node can therefore serve about four times as many authentication queries.