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Fast Secret Key Generation in Static Environments Using Induced Randomness

Nasser Aldaghri, Hessam Mahdavifar

Published Dec 1, 2018• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Secret key agreement in distributed low-power networks, such as Internet of Things (IoT) networks, is a major requirement for deploying cryptographic protocols to protect the security of sensitive data. However, due to the distributed nature of such networks, the devices need to be able to generate secret keys locally from some common source of randomness. The randomness in the characteristics of the physical layer channel provides such sources, however, this can be quite limited if the devices operate in a static environment and experience static or very slow fading channel. Therefore, fast secret key generation in such environments while keeping a low complexity architecture for the network nodes, such as IoT devices, remains a challenging task. We design a low-complexity protocol for fast secret key generation in static environments. To this end, we propose to use a limited number of random bits independently generated by the legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, in combination with the fading parameter to create a common source of randomness. In the proposed protocol, Alice and Bob share their random bits over the public channel, assumed to be a fading channel, and then construct a common random sequence. Then they perform several steps for recovery from errors in the shared sequence, privacy amplification to limit the chances of a successful attack, and consistency checking by exploiting universal hash functions. We characterize the reliability of the proposed protocol and provide an upper bound on the probability of accepting a mismatched key by Alice and Bob. The eavesdropper Eve is assumed to be passive and a successful attack by her is the event of guessing the key right based on her observations. We provide an analytical upper bound, that can be numerically evaluated, on the probability of a successful attack by Eve using the cryptographic notion of semantic security. In the simulations, the proposed protocol achieves a bit generation rate of 64-96 bits/packet, bit mismatch rate of 11-24%, bit error rate of 0.005%, 50% randomness efficiency, the probability of successful attack of at most 2-31, and the probability of consistency checking failure of at most 2-16.

DOI
10.1109/glocom.2018.8647945

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Secret key agreement in distributed low-power networks, such as Internet of Things (IoT) networks, is a major requirement for deploying cryptographic protocols to protect the security of sensitive data. However, due to the distributed nature of such networks, the devices need to be able to generate secret keys locally from some common source of randomness. The randomness in the characteristics of the physical layer channel provides such sources, however, this can be quite limited if the devices operate in a static environment and experience static or very slow fading channel. Therefore, fast secret key generation in such environments while keeping a low complexity architecture for the network nodes, such as IoT devices, remains a challenging task. We design a low-complexity protocol for fast secret key generation in static environments. To this end, we propose to use a limited number of random bits independently generated by the legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, in combination with the fading parameter to create a common source of randomness. In the proposed protocol, Alice and Bob share their random bits over the public channel, assumed to be a fading channel, and then construct a common random sequence. Then they perform several steps for recovery from errors in the shared sequence, privacy amplification to limit the chances of a successful attack, and consistency checking by exploiting universal hash functions. We characterize the reliability of the proposed protocol and provide an upper bound on the probability of accepting a mismatched key by Alice and Bob. The eavesdropper Eve is assumed to be passive and a successful attack by her is the event of guessing the key right based on her observations. We provide an analytical upper bound, that can be numerically evaluated, on the probability of a successful attack by Eve using the cryptographic notion of semantic security. In the simulations, the proposed protocol achieves a bit generation rate of 64-96 bits/packet, bit mismatch rate of 11-24%, bit error rate of 0.005%, 50% randomness efficiency, the probability of successful attack of at most 2-31, and the probability of consistency checking failure of at most 2-16.
Two legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, wish to generate secret keys from the wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper, referred to as Eve, in order to use such keys for encryption and decryption. In general, the secret key rate highly depends on the coherence time of the channel. In particular, a straightforward method of generating secret keys in static environments results in ultra-low rates. In order to resolve this problem, we introduce a low-complexity method called induced randomness. In this method, Alice and Bob independently generate local randomness to be used together with the uniqueness of the wireless channel coefficients in order to enable high-rate secret key generation. In this work, two scenarios are considered: first, when Alice and Bob share a direct communication channel, and second, when Alice and Bob do not have a direct link and communicate through an untrusted relay. After exchanging the induced randomness, post-processing is done by Alice and Bob to generate highly-correlated samples that are used for the key generation. Such samples are then converted into bits, disparities between the sequences generated by Alice and Bob are mitigated, and the resulting sequences are then hashed to compensate for the information leakage to the eavesdropper and to allow consistency checking of the generated key bit sequences. We utilize semantic security measures and information-theoretic inequalities to upper bound the probability of successful eavesdropping attack in terms of the mutual information measures that can be numerically computed. Given certain reasonable system parameters this bound is numerically evaluated to be 2-31and 2-10.57in the first and the second scenario, respectively.
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.
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.
Secret key generation based on channel characteristics is an effective physical-layer security method for 5G wireless networks. The issues of how to ensure the high key generation rate and correlation of the secret key under active attack are needed to be addressed. In this paper, a new practical secret key generation scheme with high rate and correlation is proposed. In our proposed scheme, Alice and Bob transmit independent random sequences instead of known training sequences or probing signals; neither Alice nor Bob can decode these random sequences or estimate the channel. User's random sequences together with the channel effects are used as common random source to generate the secret key. With this solution, legitimate users are able to share secret keys with sufficient length and high security under active attack. We evaluate the proposed scheme through both analytic and simulation studies. The results show that our proposed scheme achieves high key generation rate and key security, and is suitable for 5G wireless networks with resource-constrained devices.
The physical characteristics of the wireless channel can be exploited to secure communication within Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature; however, the feasibility of such techniques in IoT environments remains unclear. 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. On the other hand, in some cases IoT devices are deployed in dynamic environments wherein the channel properties changes very fast over the time. Key generation schemes proposed for one environment are not directly applicable to the other. While low key generation rate (KGR) is an issue for static environments, higher values of bit error rate (BER) becomes a bottleneck in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a mapping-table based key distribution scheme for IoT networks deployed in both static and dynamic environments. In the proposed scheme, the channel magnitude is exploited in the key generation process. The proposed scheme is immune to channel estimation errors, while providing sufficient randomness in the static environment.
Recently, there has been great interest in physical layer security techniques that exploit the randomness of wireless channels for securely extracting cryptographic keys. Several interesting approaches have been developed and demonstrated for their feasibility. The state-of-the-art, however, still has much room for improving their practicality. This is because i) the key bit generation rate supported by most existing approaches is very low which significantly limits their practical usage given the intermittent connectivity in mobile environments; ii) existing approaches suffer from the scalability and flexibility issues, i.e., they cannot be directly extended to support efficient group key generation and do not suit for static environments. With these observations in mind, we present a new secret key generation approach that utilizes the uniformly distributed phase information of channel responses to extract shared cryptographic keys under narrowband multipath fading models. The proposed approach enjoys a high key bit generation rate due to its efficient introduction of multiple randomized phase information within a single coherence time interval as the keying sources. The proposed approach also provides scalability and flexibility because it relies only on the transmission of periodical extensions of unmodulated sinusoidal beacons, which allows effective accumulation of channel phases across multiple nodes. The proposed scheme is thoroughly evaluated through both analytical and simulation studies. Compared to existing work that focus on pairwise key generation, our approach is highly scalable and can improve the analytical key bit generation rate by a couple of orders of magnitude.