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IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Sharing Secrets via Wireless Broadcasting: A New Efficient Physical Layer Group Secret Key Generation for Multiple IoT Devices

Jie Tang, Hong Wen, Huanhuan Song, Long Jiao, Kai Zeng

Published Jan 31, 2022• 36 citations
Publisher

Abstract

With the increasing demands for sharing confidential information among massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 5G and beyond wireless networks, many applications require the common secret key generation for a group of IoT devices. However, most of the existing works on physical layer secret key generation (PLKG) only focus on the pairwise key generation between two users, which is a low efficient and high cost to be extended to the scenarios of group key generation. In this work, we propose a new efficient multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) physical layer group secret key generation scheme to reduce the consumption of channel probing and improve the efficiency for group key generation. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter randomly generates the group secret key and directly broadcasts the downlink data symbols to the group users. At the receiver end, each group user can efficiently “observe” the common group key through the downlink broadcasting data symbols, while keeping perfect secrecy of the shared group key against eavesdroppers. The performance of reliability, security, and the group key generation rate is fully investigated, which shows the advantages of high efficiency, low consumption, and strong robustness of the proposed scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

DOI
10.1109/jiot.2022.3147598

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With the increasing demands for sharing confidential information among massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 5G and beyond wireless networks, many applications require the common secret key generation for a group of IoT devices. However, most of the existing works on physical layer secret key generation (PLKG) only focus on the pairwise key generation between two users, which is a low efficient and high cost to be extended to the scenarios of group key generation. In this work, we propose a new efficient multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) physical layer group secret key generation scheme to reduce the consumption of channel probing and improve the efficiency for group key generation. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter randomly generates the group secret key and directly broadcasts the downlink data symbols to the group users. At the receiver end, each group user can efficiently “observe” the common group key through the downlink broadcasting data symbols, while keeping perfect secrecy of the shared group key against eavesdroppers. The performance of reliability, security, and the group key generation rate is fully investigated, which shows the advantages of high efficiency, low consumption, and strong robustness of the proposed scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Internet of Things (IoT) enables information sharing among massive small and cheap wireless devices. However, the secret key sharing process in massive IoT applications becomes more challenging due to the low latency communication requirements and resource constrained IoT devices. To adress those probelms, we propose a physical layer secret key sharing scheme for MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) IoT applications, which can realize secret key sharing with communication simultaneously. This is because the information of secret key is attached in the combination of the activated/non-activated parallel sub-channels of the legitimate receiver, which is created by SVD (singular value decomposition) of the MIMO channel of the legitimate receiver. Consequently, the legitimate receiver can accurately obtain the shared key and demodulate the communication data with an arbitrary low key BER and BER (bit error rate). The simulation results verified the validity and security of the proposed scheme.
Recently, shared secret key generation from wireless channel characteristics has attracted a lot of attention due to its low computational overhead. However, in a static environment, the secret key rate is relatively lower due to the lack of channel time-variation. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient PLKG scheme for static channels. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter attaches the information of the secret key into the downlink pilot signals to the legitimate receiver by the proposed secret precoding. At the receiving end, the legitimate receiver can directly observe the correct information of secret key from the public downlink pilot signals, while keeping perfect secrecy of the generated key against eavesdroppers. The key principle lies in that the information of the secret key is coded in the index of the non-activated MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) sub-channel. Consequently, only the legitimate receiver can accurately observe the value of the key information. For any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from the legitimate transmitter and receiver, it is proven that she cannot observe any key information from her received signals. Therefore, the key rate can be improved for the static channels by increasing the symbol rate of the pilot signals. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
The Internet of Things technology is one of the important directions of Smart Grid research, involving many wireless sensors and communication facilities, and has high requirements for security. The physical layer security technology can effectively solve the security problems under wireless communication. As the most common application scenario of wireless communication is multi-node wireless network communication, group secret key (GSK) based on physical layer security and information theory security is gradually attracting investigator’s interest. In this paper, a novel physical layer GSK generation scheme based on code-domain exchange of channel information in mesh network is proposed. Instead of traditional side-information exchange in symbol-domain, error-correcting code is applied to finish information exchange and reconciliation simultaneously in code-domain. Each node processes the known channel bit sequence and then encodes it to generate a check sequence. After broadcasting the check bit sequence to other nodes, each node decodes the received check bit sequences to obtained the unknown channel information. The simulation results show that the scheme can effectively reduce the times of information exchanges while keeping a good performance including low bit error rate and low block error rate.
Internet of Things (IoT) enable information transmission and sharing among massive IoT devices. However, the key establishment and management in IoT become more challenging due to the low latency requirements and resource constrained IoT devices. In this work, we propose a practical physical layer based secret key sharing scheme for MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) IoT devices to reduce the communication delay caused by key establishment of MIMO IoT devices. This is because the proposed scheme attachs secret key sharing with communication simultaneously. It is achieved by the proposed MIMO self-injection AN (SAN) tranmsission, which is designed to deliberately maximum the receive SNR (signal to noise ratio) at different antenna of the legitimate IoT device, based on the value of secret key sharing to him. The simulation results verified the validity and security of the proposed scheme
The increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) also make data security a very importance. Traditional cryptographic methods are often unsuitable for IoT due to limited processing power and memory capacity, creating a need for lightweight yet effective security solutions. Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) offers a promising approach by utilizing the unique characteristics of wireless communication channels to generate secret keys without overloaded system demands. This paper show a performance analysis of Group Secret Key Generation in outdoor environments. The challenges are interfrence, physical obstacles, and dynamic changes in the communication channel was also the part of this analysis. The test results show that group secret key generation achieved optimal performance in Scenario 2, which given a correlation coefficient of 63 %, indicating strong channel similarity between nodes and a bit retention rate of 97.9 % after quantization and error correction. Scenarios 1, 3, and 4 also show a good performance, with correlation coefficients of41%,14%41 \%, 14 \%41%,14%, and 35 %, and corresponding bit retention rates of93.1%,90.9%93.1 \%, 90.9 \%93.1%,90.9%, and 95.2 %, on each tests. All scenarios successfully met the entropy thresholds required for cryptographic applications, which include that randomness and security of the generated keys was confirmed.
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.