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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

Instant and Robust Authentication and Key Agreement among Mobile Devices

Wei Xi, Chen Qian, Jinsong Han, Kun Zhao, Sheng Zhong, Xiang‐Yang Li, Jizhong Zhao

Published Oct 24, 2016• 105 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Device-to-device communication is important to emerging mobile applications such as Internet of Things and mobile social networks. Authentication and key agreement among multiple legitimate devices is the important first step to build a secure communication channel. Existing solutions put the devices into physical proximity and use the common radio environment as a proof of identities and the common secret to agree on a same key. However they experience very slow secret bit generation rate and high errors, requiring several minutes to build a 256-bit key. In this work, we design and implement an authentication and key agreement protocol for mobile devices, called The Dancing Signals (TDS), being extremely fast and error-free. TDS uses channel state information (CSI) as the common secret among legitimate devices. It guarantees that only devices in a close physical proximity can agree on a key and any device outside a certain distance gets nothing about the key. Compared with existing solutions, TDS is very fast and robust, supports group key agreement, and can effectively defend against predictable channel attacks. We implement TDS using commodity off-the-shelf 802.11n devices and evaluate its performance via extensive experiments. Results show that TDS only takes a couple of seconds to make devices agree on a 256-bit secret key with high entropy.

DOI
10.1145/2976749.2978298

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Device-to-device communication is important to emerging mobile applications such as Internet of Things and mobile social networks. Authentication and key agreement among multiple legitimate devices is the important first step to build a secure communication channel. Existing solutions put the devices into physical proximity and use the common radio environment as a proof of identities and the common secret to agree on a same key. However they experience very slow secret bit generation rate and high errors, requiring several minutes to build a 256-bit key. In this work, we design and implement an authentication and key agreement protocol for mobile devices, called The Dancing Signals (TDS), being extremely fast and error-free. TDS uses channel state information (CSI) as the common secret among legitimate devices. It guarantees that only devices in a close physical proximity can agree on a key and any device outside a certain distance gets nothing about the key. Compared with existing solutions, TDS is very fast and robust, supports group key agreement, and can effectively defend against predictable channel attacks. We implement TDS using commodity off-the-shelf 802.11n devices and evaluate its performance via extensive experiments. Results show that TDS only takes a couple of seconds to make devices agree on a 256-bit secret key with high entropy.
Secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is becoming increasingly important with the ever-growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in our daily life. To achieve secure D2D communication, the key agreement between different IoT devices without any prior knowledge is becoming desirable. Although various approaches have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from a number of limitations, such as low key generation rate and short pairing distance. In this paper, we present an inaudible acoustic signal based key generation protocol for mobile devices. Based on acoustic channel reciprocity, our system exploits channel frequency response of two legitimate devices as a common secret to generate keys. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed system in different real environments. Evaluation results show that the proposed system can generate the same secret key for two mobile devices with high probability.
Device-to-device communication is increasingly important for emerging wireless applications, including the Internet of Things and industry mobile networks. To establish a secure communication channel between multiple legitimate devices, key agreement is an essential first step. Physical layer channel information is a promising technology for achieving communication security by generating a shared channel key. In this paper, we propose an efficient and random method for generating channel keys based on channel state information (CSI). Firstly, we preprocess the available subcarriers to reduce the correlation of adjacent subcarriers. Secondly, we propose a novel quantization process to generate random and secure channel keys. The part consists of two phases: the quantization phase and the inconsistency removal phase. In the quantization stage, CSI sub carriers are grouped into small blocks, and appropriate thresholds are generated. Then, wireless users quantize the CSI subcarriers into initial bit streams of 0 and 1 with different thresholds. In the inconsistency removal phase, we design an error correction mechanism where wireless users exchange the discarded index sequences in the initial bit streams to achieve key sequence consistency. We implement the proposed scheme using off-the-shelf wireless devices and evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that each CSI packet can produce 30 bits, which have passed the NIST randomness tests.
Security over mobile Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is critical due to the open nature of distributed wireless communication. To efficiently establish a secure connection between two communication parties, a fast mobile key extraction protocol, KEEP, is proposed. KEEP fastly generates similar bit sequences from two communication parties’ measurements of channel-state information (CSI) of different subcarriers. Then, a distributed “verification-recombination” mechanism is introduced to generate the same encryption key from bit sequences without the public-key authentication, digital signature, or key distribution center of the other party. We implemented real-world experiments using commercial off-the-shelf 802.11n devices to evaluate the performance of KEEP in various scenarios. Theoretical analysis and experimental verification show that KEEP is more secure, effective, and reliable than the state-of-the-art methods.
Device to device (D2D) communication is expected to become a promising technology of the next-generation wireless communication systems. Security issues have become technical barriers of D2D communication due to its “open-air” nature and lack of centralized control. Generating symmetric keys individually on different communication parties without key exchange or distribution is desirable but challenging. Recent work has proposed to extract keys from the measurement of physical layer random variations of a wireless channel, e.g., the channel state information (CSI) from orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Existing CSI-based key extraction methods usually use the measurement results of individual subcarriers. However, our real world experiment results show that CSI measurements from near-by subcarriers have strong correlations and a generated key may have a large proportion of repeated bit segments. Hence attackers may crack the key in a relatively short time and hence reduce the security level of the generated keys. In this work, we propose a fast secret key extraction protocol, called KEEP. KEEP uses a validation-recombination mechanism to obtain consistent secret keys from CSI measurements of all subcarriers. It achieves high security level of the keys and fast key-generation rate. We implement KEEP using off-the-shelf 802.11n devices and evaluate its performance via extensive experiments. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that KEEP is safer and more effective than the state-of-the-art approaches.
Secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is becoming increasingly important with the ever-growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in our daily life. To achieve secure D2D communication, the key agreement between different IoT devices without any prior knowledge is becoming desirable. Although various approaches have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from a number of limitations, such as low key generation rate and short pairing distance. In this paper, we present InaudibleKey, an inaudible acoustic signal based key generation protocol for mobile devices. Based on acoustic channel reciprocity, InaudibleKey exploits the acoustic channel frequency response of two legitimate devices as a common secret to generating keys. InaudibleKey employs several novel technologies to significantly improve its performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed system in different real environments. Compared to state-of-the-art works, InaudibleKey improves key generation rate by 3 times, extends pairing distance by 3.2 times, and reduces information reconciliation counts by 2.5 times. Security analysis demonstrates that InaudibleKey is resilient to a number of malicious attacks. We also implement InaudibleKey on modern smartphones and resource-limited IoT devices. Results show that it is energy-efficient and can run on both powerful and resource-limited IoT devices without incurring excessive resource consumption.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.