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arXiv:1910.08770

A Channel Perceiving Attack on Long-Range Key Generation and Its Countermeasure

Yang Lu, Yansong Gao, Junqing Zhang, Seyit Ahmet Camtepe, Dhammika Jayalath

Published Oct 19, 2019• 0 citations
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Abstract

The physical-layer key generation is a lightweight technique to generate secret keys from wireless channels for resource-constrained Internet of things (IoT) applications. The security of key generation relies on spatial decorrelation, which assumes that eavesdroppers observe uncorrelated channel measurements when they are located over a half-wavelength away from legitimate users. Unfortunately, there is no experimental validation for communications environments when there are large-scale and small-scale fading effects. Furthermore, while the current key generation work mainly focuses on short-range communications techniques such as WiFi and ZigBee, the exploration with long-range communications, e.g., LoRa, is rather limited. This paper presents a LoRa-based key generation testbed and reveals a new colluding-eavesdropping attack that perceives and utilizes large-scale fading effects in key generation channels, by using multiple eavesdroppers circularly around a legitimate user. We formalized the attack and validated it through extensive experiments conducted under both indoor and outdoor environments. It is corroborated that the attack reduces secret key capacity when large-scale fading is predominant. We further investigated potential defenses by proposing a conditional entropy and high-pass filter-based countermeasure to estimate and eliminate large-scale fading associated components. The experimental results demonstrated that the countermeasure can significantly improve the key generation's security when there are both varying large-scale and small-scale fading effects. The key bits generated by legitimate users have a low key disagreement rate (KDR) and validated by the NIST randomness tests. On the other hand, eavesdroppers' average KDR is increased to 0.49, which is no better than a random guess.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1910.08770

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The physical-layer key generation is a lightweight technique to generate secret keys from wireless channels for resource-constrained Internet of things (IoT) applications. The security of key generation relies on spatial decorrelation, which assumes that eavesdroppers observe uncorrelated channel measurements when they are located over a half-wavelength away from legitimate users. Unfortunately, there is no experimental validation for communications environments when there are large-scale and small-scale fading effects. Furthermore, while the current key generation work mainly focuses on short-range communications techniques such as WiFi and ZigBee, the exploration with long-range communications, e.g., LoRa, is rather limited. This paper presents a LoRa-based key generation testbed and reveals a new colluding-eavesdropping attack that perceives and utilizes large-scale fading effects in key generation channels, by using multiple eavesdroppers circularly around a legitimate user. We formalized the attack and validated it through extensive experiments conducted under both indoor and outdoor environments. It is corroborated that the attack reduces secret key capacity when large-scale fading is predominant. We further investigated potential defenses by proposing a conditional entropy and high-pass filter-based countermeasure to estimate and eliminate large-scale fading associated components. The experimental results demonstrated that the countermeasure can significantly improve the key generation's security when there are both varying large-scale and small-scale fading effects. The key bits generated by legitimate users have a low key disagreement rate (KDR) and validated by the NIST randomness tests. On the other hand, eavesdroppers' average KDR is increased to 0.49, which is no better than a random guess.
Physical layer key generation that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Despite much research efforts in this field, the problem of wireless key generation at long distance and low data rate remains unknown and has not been studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis in real indoor and outdoor environments to explore the feasibility of wireless key generation for long range (LoRa)-based network. Our experimental results show that: 1) the low transmission rate will lead to low channel reciprocity which makes wireless key generation significantly challenging and 2) when the requirement of high reciprocity is fulfilled, two nodes can generate the same secret key even when they are far away from each other (a few kilometers). Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we present LoRa-Key, the first complete key establishment protocol for LoRa network by exploring the shared randomness extracted from measured received signal strength indicator. LoRa-Key employs a number of signal processing techniques to improve key generation rate significantly. Moreover, we propose a novel compressive sensing-based reconciliation framework to reduce mismatch rate. Experimental results show that LoRa-Key can achieve key establishment rates of 18 bit/s in stationary scenario and 31 bit/s in mobile scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies key generation protocol for LoRa network.
Physical layer key generation that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Despite much research efforts in this field, the problem of wireless key generation at long distance and low data rate remains unknown and has not been studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis in real indoor and outdoor environments to explore the feasibility of wireless key generation for Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). Based on the results, we present LoRa-Key, the first complete key establishment protocol for LoRaWAN by exploring the shared randomness extracted from measured Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). LoRa-Key employs a number of signal processing techniques to improve key generation rate significantly. Experimental results show that LoRa-Key can achieve key establishment rates of 13 bit/s in stationary scenario and 21 bit/s in mobile scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies key generation protocol for LoRaWAN.
The billions of IoT devices in our home, healthcare, and industry rely on cryptographic keys for security. Constrained by computing and power resources, their keys are often pre-shared and rarely updated, creating a major vulnerability. The physical-layer wireless key generation can efficiently update keys but requires fluctuating wireless channel conditions, which, however, are scarce in static deployments. Here we show a novel wireless key generation that produces secure keys for static IoT without hardware assistance or secret exchange. We propose a randomness that is composed of received signal strengths and locally selected transmit power levels; the latter are independently selected at both communication pairs and are never exchanged, resulting in distinctive received signal strengths to ensure secrecy. We propose quantization and entropy balancing to boost generation efficiency and consistency. Experiments on an IoT testbed across multiple static scenarios achieve a fast key generation rate of 9.47 bits per second and a low key disagreement rate of 0.05, while defending against eavesdropping attacks. Xintao Huan and colleagues report a physical-layer wireless key generation scheme for static IoT scenarios. This scheme does not require hardware assistance or secret exchange and achieves fast key generation in static IoT while defending against eavesdropping attacks.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks generally contain resource-constrained devices that require an energy-efficient key generation procedure to producing secure keys at a faster rate. The physical characteristics of the wireless channel can be exploited to secure communication within IoT networks. In particular, secret keys can be generated by leveraging on the randomness of the wireless physical channel between two communicating parties. The conventional mechanism of generating keys at the physical layer, i.e., using channel probing, quantization, information reconciliation, and privacy amplification, may not be preferable for IoT devices. In addition, in some cases IoT devices may be deployed in static environments, wherein the channel coherence time is too high to generate keys at a faster rate and with the desired randomness. This study proposes a mapping table-based key distribution scheme for IoT environments, wherein multiple characteristics of the random channel are combined to improve not only the key generation rate (KGR) but also the key agreement rate (KAR) and bit error rate (BER). In the proposed scheme, both the channel magnitude and the phase are exploited in the key generation process. The proposed scheme is immune to channel estimation errors while providing sufficient randomness in the static environment. Additionally, the scheme is thoroughly investigated for different scenarios including the case of a smarter eavesdropper, which attempts to estimate the channel between the legitimate nodes. This case verifies the robustness of the proposed scheme in different settings and attack models.
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) has emerged as the dominant open specification in recent years due to its ability to offer affordable connectivity to the low-power devices distributed over large geographical areas. However, security issues have not been fully addressed in LPWAN specifications, especially, key distribution and key management. Physical layer key generation, which exploits wireless channel reciprocity and randomness to generate secure keys, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we exploit the physical layer key generation problem in LPWAN communication and present a distributed and lightweight key generation scheme for Long Range (LoRa) based network. It explores the shared randomness extracted from measured RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) as consensus information to generate secure keys. To negotiate the RSSI signal as a bidirectional consistent key sequence, we propose a novel level-crossing quantization algorithm with an improved Cascade key agreement protocol to improve the key generation rate, as well as to avoid information leakage during transmission. We implement the proposed physical layer key generation scheme in a LoRa network prototype. Then we conduct extensive experiments in stationary and mobile indoor environments to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed key generation scheme. Experimental results show that its achievable key rate can reach 29.5% in stationary scenario and 35.5% in mobile scenario. Its key generation rate can exceed 1 bit/s with a lightweight implementation on the LoRa network prototype. For the 128-bit key sequence, it passes the the NIST suite of statistical tests.
With a massive amount of wireless sensor nodes in Internet of Things (IoT), it is difficult to establish key distribution and management mechanism for traditional encryption technology. Alternatively, the physical layer key generation technology is promising to implement in IoT, since it is based on the principle of information-theoretical security and has the advantage of low complexity. Most existing key generation schemes assume that eavesdropping channels are independent of legitimate channels, which may not be practical especially when eavesdropper nodes are near to legitimate nodes. However, this paper investigates key generation problems for a multi-relay wireless network in IoT, where the correlation between eavesdropping and legitimate channels are considered. Key generation schemes are proposed for both non-colluding and partially colluding eavesdroppers situations. The main idea is to divide the key agreement process into three phases: 1) we first generate a secret key by exploiting the difference between the random channels associated with each relay node and the eavesdropping channels; 2) another key is generated by integrating the residual common randomness associated with each relay pair; 3) the two keys generated in the first two phases are concatenated into the final key. The secrecy key performance of the proposed key generation schemes is also derived with closed-forms.