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International Conference on Communications

Cooperative Secret Key Generation for Platoon-Based Vehicular Communications

Kai Li, Lingyun Lu, Wei Ni, Eduardo Tovar, Mohsen Guizani

Published May 1, 2019• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In a vehicular platoon, the lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates messages to the following automated vehicles in a multi-hop vehicular network. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping and message modification. Generating secret keys by extracting the shared randomness in a wireless fading channel is a promising way for V2V communication security. We study a security scheme for platoon-based V2V communications, where the platooning vehicles generate a shared secret key based on the quantized fading channel randomness. To improve conformity of the generated key, the probability of secret key agreement is formulated, and a novel secret key agreement algorithm is proposed to recursively optimize the channel quantization intervals, maximizing the key agreement probability. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the key agreement probability achieved by our security protocol given different platoon size, channel quality, and number of quantization intervals. Furthermore, by applying our security protocol, it is shown that the probability that the encrypted data being cracked by an eavesdropper is less than 5%.

DOI
10.1109/icc.2019.8762090

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In a vehicular platoon, the lead vehicle that is responsible for managing the platoon's moving directions and velocity periodically disseminates messages to the following automated vehicles in a multi-hop vehicular network. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping and message modification. Generating secret keys by extracting the shared randomness in a wireless fading channel is a promising way for V2V communication security. We study a security scheme for platoon-based V2V communications, where the platooning vehicles generate a shared secret key based on the quantized fading channel randomness. To improve conformity of the generated key, the probability of secret key agreement is formulated, and a novel secret key agreement algorithm is proposed to recursively optimize the channel quantization intervals, maximizing the key agreement probability. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the key agreement probability achieved by our security protocol given different platoon size, channel quality, and number of quantization intervals. Furthermore, by applying our security protocol, it is shown that the probability that the encrypted data being cracked by an eavesdropper is less than 5%.
Securing wireless communication is significant for privacy and confidentiality of sensing data in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). However, due to broadcast nature of radio channels, disseminating sensory data is vulnerable to eavesdropping and message modification. Generating secret keys by extracting the shared randomness in a wireless fading channel is a promising way to improve the communication security. In this poster, we present a novel secret key generation protocol for securing real-time data dissemination in CPS, where the sensor nodes cooperatively generate a shared key by estimating the quantized fading channel randomness. A 2-hop wireless sensor network testbed is built and preliminary experimental results show that the quantization intervals and distance between the nodes lead to a secret bit mismatch.
Due to the sensitivity of the information exchanged in Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication, generating secret keys is critical to secure these communications. As nature is open access, distributed keys are more vulnerable to attacks in the vehicular environment. Physical layer key generation methods using wireless channel characteristics show promise in preventing such attacks, generating keys independently, and removing the need for distribution. In this paper, we present a novel key generation approach in a real vehicular environment based on Channel State Information (CSI), including a new algorithm for key bit extraction. We implemented our algorithm using USRP B210 Software-Defined Radios (SDR) and the industry-standard V2X communication protocol: IEEE 802.11p. The proposed key generation protocol uses the CSI values of each sub-carrier as a source of randomness, from which bits are extracted using a new QAM demodulator quantizer (QAM-Dem-Quan). We compared our technique to state-of-the-art Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based approaches, and show that our method achieves better performance. Moreover, we reached a min-entropy of approximately 70% for the generated keys and a key generation rate of less than150 μs150~\mu \text{s}150 μs/key for key lengths ranging from 16 to 128 bits.
Abstract Security in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is one of the major challenging topics and the secure key interchange between two legitimate vehicles is an important issue. The multi-environment of VANET has been exploited to extract the secret key and employed security services in VANET. However, it offered more excellence randomness owed to fading, noise multi-path, and velocity difference. Some of the factors like Bit-rate, complication and memory requests are reduced by using a process known as quantization. This paper proposes a new quantization method to extract the secret key for vehicular communications that uses a lossy quantizer in combination with information reconciliation and privacy amplification. Our work focuses on the quantization phase for the secret generation procedure. The comprehensive simulations display the propose method increases the zone and number of the quantization levels to utilize the maximum number of measurements to reduce reasonably the wasted measurements.
With the rise of connected vehicular networks, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has become a fundamental enabler for intelligent transportation systems. However, the open nature of wireless channels introduces risks such as eavesdropping and key compromise. To address these issues, we propose a secure V2V communication scheme based on Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) using LoRa technology. The proposed system utilizes Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements between two moving vehicles as the entropy source. To improve the channel correlation, a Savitzky-Golay filter is applied as a preprocessing step. Adaptive multibit quantization is then used to convert the RSSI into binary sequences, followed by the Cascade algorithm for error reconciliation. To enhance randomness, privacy amplification is applied using universal hashing and SHA-1. Finally, the generated key is used for AES-128 encryption. The system is implemented on Raspberry Pi 4B using AcSiP EK-S76SXB and RAK2245 LoRa modules. Experimental validation was conducted in three movement scenarios firstly both vehicle move from opposite-direction at10 km/h\mathbf{1 0 ~ k m} / \mathbf{h}10 km/hfor300\mathbf{3 0 0}300meters, secondly both vehicle move at the same-direction at10 km/h\mathbf{1 0 ~ k m} / \mathbf{h}10 km/hfor800\mathbf{8 0 0}800meters, and lastly same as the second scenario but with different speed at20 km/h20 ~\text{km} / \mathrm{h}20 km/h. Results shown that the system achieves a reliable key generation rate (KGR) of up to 176075.73 bit/s while maintaining low computation time, demonstrating its feasibility for secure real-time V2V communication.
In intelligent transportation systems (ITS), communications between vehicles, i.e. vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are of greatest importance to facilitate autonomous driving. The current state-of-the-art for secure data exchange in V2V communications relies on public-key cryptography (PKC) consuming significant computational and energy resources for the encryption/decryption process and large bandwidth for the key distribution. To overcome these limitations, physical-layer security (PLS) has emerged as a lightweight solution by exploiting the physical characteristics of the V2V communication channel to generate symmetric cryptographic keys. Currently, key-generation algorithms are designed via empirical parameter settings, without resulting in optimum key-generation performance. In this paper, we devise a key-generation algorithm for PLS in V2V communications by introducing a novel channel response quantisation method that results in optimum performance via analytical parameter settings. Contrary to the current state-of-the-art, the channel responses incorporate all V2V channel attributes that contribute to temporal variability, such as three dimensional (3D) scattering and scatterers' mobility. An extra functionality, namely, Perturbe-Observe (PO), is further incorporated that enables the algorithm to adapt to the inherent non-reciprocity of the V2V channel responses at the legitimate entities. Optimum performance is evidenced via maximisation of the key bit generation rate (BGR) and key entropy (H) and minimisation of the key bit mismatch rate (BMR). A new metric is further introduced, the so-called secret-bit generation rate (SBGR), as the ratio of the number of bits which are successfully used to compose keys to the total amount of channel samples. SBGR unifies BGR and BMR and is thus maximised by the proposed algorithmic process.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, wireless communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping, message modification, and node impersonation. Securing the wireless communication requires the shared secret keys between the communicating entities. Traditional security schemes rely on public key infrastructures and cryptographic algorithms to manage secret keys. Recently, many physical-layer-based methods have been proposed as alternative solutions for key generation in wireless networks. These methods exploit the inherent randomness of the wireless fading channel to generate secret keys while providing information-theoretical security without intensive cryptographic computations. This article provides an overview of the existing PHY-based key generation schemes exploiting the randomness of the wireless channels. Specifically, we first introduce the fundamental and general framework of the PHY-based key generation schemes and then categorize them into two classes: received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. Finally, we present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.