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A Secrete Key Extraction Using Received Signal Strength (RSS) of Wireless Networks

T, Solai Rajan, J, Udaya Kumar D, Mahato, Anima

Published Apr 25, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of secret key extraction from the Received signal strength (RSS) variations on the wireless channel between the two devices for private communication between them. We use real world measurements of RSS in a variety of environments and settings. The results from our experiments with 802.11-based laptops show that 1)An adversary can cause predictable key generation in these static environments, and 2)In dynamic scenarios where the two devices are mobile, high entropy bits are obtained . Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we develop an environment adaptive secret key generation scheme that uses an adaptive Cascade-based information reconciliation and privacy amplification. In our scheme, to provide good scalability in terms of the number of nodes, we utilize a combinatorial design of public-private key pairs, which means nodes combine more than one key pair to encrypt and decrypt messages. We also show that it provides controllable resilience when malicious nodes compromise a limited number of nodes before key revocation and renewal.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21602199

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In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of secret key extraction from the Received signal strength (RSS) variations on the wireless channel between the two devices for private communication between them. We use real world measurements of RSS in a variety of environments and settings. The results from our experiments with 802.11-based laptops show that 1)An adversary can cause predictable key generation in these static environments, and 2)In dynamic scenarios where the two devices are mobile, high entropy bits are obtained . Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we develop an environment adaptive secret key generation scheme that uses an adaptive Cascade-based information reconciliation and privacy amplification. In our scheme, to provide good scalability in terms of the number of nodes, we utilize a combinatorial design of public-private key pairs, which means nodes combine more than one key pair to encrypt and decrypt messages. We also show that it provides controllable resilience when malicious nodes compromise a limited number of nodes before key revocation and renewal.
We evaluate the effectiveness of secret key extraction, for private communication between two wireless devices, from the received signal strength (RSS) variations on the wireless channel between the two devices. We use real world measurements of RSS in a variety of environments and settings. Our experimental results show that (i) in certain environments, due to lack of variations in the wireless channel, the extracted bits have very low entropy making these bits unsuitable for a secret key, (ii) an adversary can cause predictable key generation in these static environments, and (iii) in dynamic scenarios where the two devices are mobile, and/or where there is a significant movement in the environment, high entropy bits are obtained fairly quickly. Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we develop an environment adaptive secret key generation scheme that uses an adaptive lossy quantizer in conjunction with Cascade-based information reconciliation [7] and privacy amplification [14]. Our measurements show that our scheme, in comparison to the existing ones that we evaluate, performs the best in terms of generating high entropy bits at a high bit rate. The secret key bit streams generated by our scheme also pass the randomness tests of the NIST test suite [21] that we conduct.
We evaluate the effectiveness of secret key extraction, for private communication between two wireless devices, from the received signal strength (RSS) variations on the wireless channel between the two devices. We use real world measurements of RSS in a variety of environments and settings. The results from our experiments with 802.11-based laptops show that in certain environments, due to lack of variations in the wireless channel, the extracted bits have very low entropy making these bits unsuitable for a secret key, an adversary can cause predictable key generation in these static environments, and in dynamic scenarios where the two devices are mobile, and/or where there is a significant movement in the environment, high entropy bits are obtained fairly quickly. Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we develop an environment adaptive secret key generation scheme that uses an adaptive lossy quantizer in conjunction with Cascade-based information reconciliation and privacy amplification. Our measurements show that our scheme, in comparison to the existing ones that we evaluate, performs the best in terms of generating high entropy bits at a high bit rate. The secret key bit streams generated by our scheme also pass the randomness tests of the NIST test suite that we conduct. We also build and evaluate the performance of secret key extraction using small, low-power, hand-held devices-Google Nexus One phones-that are equipped 802.11 wireless network cards. Last, we evaluate secret key extraction in a multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-like sensor network testbed that we create using multiple TelosB sensor nodes. We find that our MIMO-like sensor environment produces prohibitively high bit mismatch, which we address using an iterative distillation stage that we add to the key extraction process. Ultimately, we show that the secret key generation rate is increased when multiple sensors are involved in the key extraction process.
Shared key generation between two users to exploit the randomness of wireless channels as a source of secret key bits extraction has become an attractive alternative to ensure security in a mobile environment. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of key extraction scheme using measurement results of Received Signal Strength (RSS) on several variations of settings and types of movement. We add the moving average method before the quantization process so our scheme becomes more adaptive to the low variation of RSS, and the use of modified Level Crossing Algorithm to reduce Key Disagreement Rate (KDR) due to half-duplex mode, device limitation, and different types of devices. The results show that our proposed schemes, compared with the existing scheme produce bit stream with the highest entropy, a significant decrease of KDR and passed randomness test from NIST statistical suite.
In symmetric cryptography systems have problems in the distribution of secret keys. The two users who will communicate require sharing keys through the public channel. The proposed solution to overcome these problems is to utilize information from the physical layer (e.g. RSS). Received Signal Strength (RSS) is an indicator for measuring the power received by wireless devices. The advantage of secret key extraction using physical layer information from a wireless channel is that it allows both devices within the transmission range to extract the secret key together. In this paper, we propose a secret key generation scheme adopted from an existing scheme with modifications to improve performance. Our proposed system is applied to static and dynamic conditions to test performance. The proposed algorithm is able to obtain a reduction in KDR (Key Disagreement Rate) up to 48.42% and an increase in the KGR (Key Generation Rate) up to 23.35% when compared to the existing scheme. Our proposed system also successfully passed the randomness using the NIST test with the approximate value of entropy generated 0.80 in static conditions and 0.81 in dynamic conditions.
To secure the communications in cognitive radio networks (CRNs), a group secret key extraction scheme based on received signal strength (RSS) was proposed. This scheme employed relay nodes to extract a group secret key in the chain topology. Be more specific, nodes other than the head and the tail were considered as relay nodes, of which the RSS measurement of each adjacent pair was extracted. Then, each RSS measurement was quantified referring to predetermined thresholds to ensure the randomness of the generated key which was multiple RSS measurements related. Finally, the gray code was utilized to encode the quantified RSS measurements. In this paper, MATLAB was used to simulate the process of users establishing group secret key in Gaussian channel. By setting different levels of noise, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varied from 0 dB to 30 dB. The results showed that the bit inconsistency rate increased with the number of nodes in the group and decreased with the increase of SNR. At the same time, the key generation rate of the proposed scheme under different conditions was analyzed by numerical analysis. It showed that the group secret key rate varied with the number of nodes in the group and SNR, which was opposite to the bit inconsistency rate. The proposed scheme outperforms contemporary ones with higher extraction efficiency and a lower communication cost as well.
Securing wireless communication remains challenging in dynamic mobile environments due to the shared nature of wireless medium and lacking of fixed key management infrastructures. Generating secret keys using physical layer information thus has drawn much attention to complement traditional cryptographic-based methods. Although recent work has demonstrated that Received Signal Strength (RSS) based secret key extraction is practical, existing RSS-based key generation techniques are largely limited in the rate they generate secret bits and are mainly applicable to mobile wireless networks. In this paper, we show that exploiting the channel response from multiple Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers can provide fine-grained channel information and achieve higher bit generation rate for both static and mobile cases in real-world scenarios. We further develop a Channel Gain Complement (CGC) assisted secret key extraction scheme to cope with channel non-reciprocity encountered in practice. Our extensive experiments using WiFi networks in both indoor as well as outdoor environments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significantly faster secret bit generation rate at 60 ~ 90bit/packet, and is resilient to malicious attacks identified to be harmful to RSS-based techniques including predictable channel attack and stalking attack.