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Journal of Physics Conference Series

RSS-AoA-Based Physical Layer Secret Key Generation for Mobile Wireless Nodes

Xiaohui Shang, Aijun Liu, Hao Yin, Yida Wang, Yong Wang

Published Feb 1, 2019• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For the future Internet of Things (IoT) with ubiquitous wireless connectivity, the physical layer secret key (PLSK) scheme has been recognized as an effective and lightweight way to achieve secure communications by exploiting the reciprocity of the wireless channel. Compared with channel state information (CSI)-based PLSK generation schemes, received signal strength (RSS)-based schemes are more advantageous in terms of the communication costs and mobility for the IoT applications. However, due to the vulnerability of predictable channel attacks, RSS-based schemes cannot always guarantee perfect security. In this paper, we combine angle of arrival (AoA) and received signal strength (RSS) to generate physical layer secret key (PLSK). In particular, we propose a novel measurement named effective key generation rate (EKGR) to comprehensively and directly evaluate a PLSK scheme. Meanwhile, we further simplify the conventional PLSK generation steps to meet the low-complexity demand of IoT devices. At last, numerical results demonstrate that comparing with RSS-based and AoA-based schemes, our proposed EKGR of the RSS-AoA-based scheme achieves 78% or even 120% performance improvement.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/1169/1/012067

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For the future Internet of Things (IoT) with ubiquitous wireless connectivity, the physical layer secret key (PLSK) scheme has been recognized as an effective and lightweight way to achieve secure communications by exploiting the reciprocity of the wireless channel. Compared with channel state information (CSI)-based PLSK generation schemes, received signal strength (RSS)-based schemes are more advantageous in terms of the communication costs and mobility for the IoT applications. However, due to the vulnerability of predictable channel attacks, RSS-based schemes cannot always guarantee perfect security. In this paper, we combine angle of arrival (AoA) and received signal strength (RSS) to generate physical layer secret key (PLSK). In particular, we propose a novel measurement named effective key generation rate (EKGR) to comprehensively and directly evaluate a PLSK scheme. Meanwhile, we further simplify the conventional PLSK generation steps to meet the low-complexity demand of IoT devices. At last, numerical results demonstrate that comparing with RSS-based and AoA-based schemes, our proposed EKGR of the RSS-AoA-based scheme achieves 78% or even 120% performance improvement.
In this paper, the impacts of mobility on the performance of angle of arrival (AoA) based physical layer secret key (PLSK) is investigated. Specifically, security probability (SP) and consistency probability (CP) are derived to describe the effects of mobility. Moreover, effective key generation rate (EKGR) is defined to evaluate more comprehensively and accurately how the speed in mobile scenario affects the PLSK. The simulation results presented prove the correctness and effectiveness of the analysis, which is important to provide a framework for parameters setting in AoA based PLSK.
Secure communication in Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be improved through physical-layer secret key generation. In secret key generation, an information reconciliation process is required to match the bit sequences between the two communicating devices. However, this process often involves complex statistical computations that increase system overhead and require the transmission of bits over an insecure public channel. Therefore, this research presents a lightweight reconciliation algorithm based on minimal bit syndrome to reduce overhead and improve key security. The proposed method processes quantized Received Signal Strength (RSS) values into 8-bit block syndrome-based reconciliation mechanism and only the 8-bit syndromes from mismatched block are transmitted over the public channel. System testing was conducted under both static and dynamic scenarios in an indoor area using Raspberry Pi nodes. The results show that the proposed scheme demonstrates an improvement in the Key Generation Rate (KGR) by 2.2% and reduces the processing time by 11.6% in dynamic scenario and 8.3% in the static scenario. Also, the proposed scheme reduce the quantization and reconciliation time by 50% compared to previous research. Furthermore, the proposed method maintained a Key Disagreement Rate (KDR) of 0% across all block size and successfully passed the NIST randomness and complexity test, with all test parameters achieving p-values above 0.01. These result indicate that the proposed scheme improve the performance of existing secret key generation methods and it is suitable for implementation in IoT devices.
Abstract: Physical layer key generation, leveraging the reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels, has garnered significant research interest in recent years. While theoretical studies have demonstrated its potential to generate informationtheoretically secure keys, challenges remain in translating theory into practice. This paper provides an overview of the physical layer key generation process and discusses its practical challenges. Various passive and active attacks are analyzed and evaluated through numerical studies. A new key generation scheme using random probing signals and combining usergenerated randomness with channel randomness is introduced to counteract active attacks. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher security strength than existing schemes using constant probing signals under active attacks. Secret-key generation relying on wireless channel reciprocity is an intriguing solution as it can be efficiently implemented at the physical layer of emerging wireless communication networks, while providing information-theoretic security guarantees. In this paper, we investigate and compare the secret-key capacity based on the sampling of the entire complex channel state information (CSI) or only its envelope, the received signal strength (RSS).
Physical-layer security (PLS) has the potential to strongly enhance the overall system security as an alternative to or in combination with conventional cryptographic primitives usually implemented at higher network layers. Secret-key generation relying on wireless channel reciprocity is an interesting solution as it can be efficiently implemented at the physical layer of emerging wireless communication networks, while providing information-theoretic security guarantees. In this article, we investigate and compare the secret-key capacity based on the sampling of the entire complex channel state information (CSI) or only its envelope, the received signal strength (RSS). Moreover, as opposed to previous works, we take into account the fact that the eavesdropper's observations might be correlated and we consider the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime where we can find simple analytical expressions for the secret-key capacity. As already found in previous works, we find that RSS-based secret-key generation is heavily penalized as compared to CSI-based systems. At high SNR, we are able to precisely and simply quantify this penalty: a halved pre-log factor and a constant penalty of about 0.69 bit, which disappears as Eve's channel gets highly correlated.
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes popular technology. The one aspect that makes important concern in IoT is the confidentiality of communications. For securing communication in IoT, cryptography algorithm such as symmetrical cryptography requires the secret key exchange process in a public wireless network to ensure the sameness of the secret key. However, the exchange of secret keys in the public wireless network can be exploited by adversaries. So, we present the secret key generation scheme that generates a shared random key through observation of the communication channel parameter i.e. Receive Signal Strength (RSS) between two devices that no need to exchange the secret key. We use Middle-Point quantization to convert the RSS into bit sequences and use Clover Filter to eliminate the error bits after the quantization process. Measurement results showed that the proposed scheme improves the performance of existing schemes if the interval used is 25. The proposed scheme improves the KGR 24 times and improves efficiency to 63%. While for KDR, the proposed scheme can decrease the KDR value of 67.9%. Also, in all scenarios, the proposed scheme can pass the NIST randomness test.
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.