At the 13th IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (IEEE CNS 2025), held in Avignon, France, from September 8 to 11, a paper titled "Collusion-Driven Impersonation Attack on Channel-Resistant RF Fingerprinting," co-authored by faculty and students from the School of Cyber Science and Engineering at Southeast University, won the Best Paper Award Runner-Up.

Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF), examined in the paper, is a highly promising device identification technology. It plays a key role in ensuring security in critical scenarios such as future 6G wireless access and holds broad application prospects. However, current research on RFF primarily focuses on enhancing its robustness in complex channel environments, while research on its security—particularly its defense capabilities against advanced impersonation attacks—remains largely unexplored. This paper systematically investigates the advanced security threats faced by RFF for the first time, revealing the risk of RFF systems being compromised under specific conditions. The research team proposed a collusion-driven RF fingerprint forgery method for multipath channels. They successfully achieved the precise simulation and spoofing of channel-robust RF fingerprints, thereby proving the feasibility of advanced impersonation attacks. This research not only identifies the security blind spots in current technologies but also provides crucial theoretical guidance and practical directions for the security reinforcement and improvement of future RFF technologies.

The first author of the paper is Xu Zhou, an undergraduate of the 2021 cohort and a newly admitted graduate student of the 2025 cohort in the School of Cyber Science and Engineering. The supervisor and corresponding author is Prof. Li Guyue. The award-winning work is mainly based on research Xu Zhou conducted during his undergraduate studies.

IEEE CNS is the only flagship academic conference within the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) core conference portfolio dedicated solely to cybersecurity, and it is a spin-off of the internationally renowned networking conference IEEE INFOCOM. The conference enjoys high recognition in the academic community, with its academic level widely regarded as equivalent to a Class-B conference recommended by the China Computer Federation (CCF). Its paper acceptance rate consistently remains around 28%, ensuring the high quality of the presented research and the strong competitiveness of the conference.