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ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks

Key Extraction Using Ambient Sounds for Smart Devices

Yuexin Zhang, Fengjuan Zhou, Xinyi Huang, Li Xu, Ayong Ye

Published Jun 16, 2022• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

To secure communications, this article presents a key extraction scheme for smart devices using ambient sounds. Specifically, it is designed for the scenario when smart devices do not have any pre-loaded secrets. Moreover, it can be implemented when smart devices have no access to the online trusted third party or the Network Time Protocol server. In our scheme, smart devices achieve synchronization by making use of ambient sounds. Then, they calculate and obtain the pairing distance and secure distance by applying a band-pass filter. Completing these operations, two smart devices can directly extract a communication key. We analyze the security of our scheme and evaluate the performance of it by implementing the scheme using a few off-the-shelf devices. The experimental results indicate that compared with related schemes, the bit generation rate of our scheme has significant improvement (increases at least 80%), and it can reach 312 bit/s.

DOI
10.1145/3544108

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•Jan 1, 2015•0 citations
To secure communications, this article presents a key extraction scheme for smart devices using ambient sounds. Specifically, it is designed for the scenario when smart devices do not have any pre-loaded secrets. Moreover, it can be implemented when smart devices have no access to the online trusted third party or the Network Time Protocol server. In our scheme, smart devices achieve synchronization by making use of ambient sounds. Then, they calculate and obtain the pairing distance and secure distance by applying a band-pass filter. Completing these operations, two smart devices can directly extract a communication key. We analyze the security of our scheme and evaluate the performance of it by implementing the scheme using a few off-the-shelf devices. The experimental results indicate that compared with related schemes, the bit generation rate of our scheme has significant improvement (increases at least 80%), and it can reach 312 bit/s.
To build a secure wireless networking system, it is essential that the cryptographic key is known only to the two (or more) communicating parties. Existing key extraction schemes put the devices into the physical proximity, and utilize the common inherent randomness between the devices to agree on a secret key, but they often rely on custom devices and have low bit rate. In this paper, we seek a key extraction approach that only leverages off-the-shelf mobile devices, while achieving significantly higher key generation efficiency. The core idea of our approach is to exploit fast varying inaudible acoustic channel for generating enough randomness and wireless parallel communication for exchanging reconciliation information to improve the key generation rate. We have carefully studied and validated the feasibility of our approach through both theoretical analysis and a variety of measurements. We implement our approach on different mobile devices and conduct extensive experiments in different real scenarios. The experiment results show that our approach achieves high efficiency and satisfactory robustness. Compared with the state of art methods, our approach improves the key generation rate by 38.46% and reduces the bit mismatch ratio by 42.34%.
To build a secure wireless networking system, it is essential that the cryptographic key is known only to the two (or more) communicating parties. Existing key extraction schemes put the devices into physical proximity and utilize the common inherent randomness between the devices to agree on a secret key, but they often rely on specialized hardware (e.g., the specific wireless NIC model) and have low bit rates. In this article, we seek a key extraction approach that only leverages off-the-shelf mobile devices, while achieving significantly higher key generation efficiency. The core idea of our approach is to exploit the fast varying inaudible acoustic channel as the common random source for key generation and wireless parallel communication for exchanging reconciliation information to improve the key generation rate. We have carefully studied and validated the feasibility of our approach through both theoretical analysis and a variety of measurements. We implement our approach on different mobile devices and conduct extensive experiments in different real scenarios. The experiment results show that our approach achieves high efficiency and satisfactory robustness. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach improves the key generation rate by 38.46% and reduces the bit mismatch ratio by 42.34%.
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.
Device-to-device communication is increasingly important for emerging wireless applications, including the Internet of Things and industry mobile networks. To establish a secure communication channel between multiple legitimate devices, key agreement is an essential first step. Physical layer channel information is a promising technology for achieving communication security by generating a shared channel key. In this paper, we propose an efficient and random method for generating channel keys based on channel state information (CSI). Firstly, we preprocess the available subcarriers to reduce the correlation of adjacent subcarriers. Secondly, we propose a novel quantization process to generate random and secure channel keys. The part consists of two phases: the quantization phase and the inconsistency removal phase. In the quantization stage, CSI sub carriers are grouped into small blocks, and appropriate thresholds are generated. Then, wireless users quantize the CSI subcarriers into initial bit streams of 0 and 1 with different thresholds. In the inconsistency removal phase, we design an error correction mechanism where wireless users exchange the discarded index sequences in the initial bit streams to achieve key sequence consistency. We implement the proposed scheme using off-the-shelf wireless devices and evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that each CSI packet can produce 30 bits, which have passed the NIST randomness tests.
Security over mobile Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is critical due to the open nature of distributed wireless communication. To efficiently establish a secure connection between two communication parties, a fast mobile key extraction protocol, KEEP, is proposed. KEEP fastly generates similar bit sequences from two communication parties’ measurements of channel-state information (CSI) of different subcarriers. Then, a distributed “verification-recombination” mechanism is introduced to generate the same encryption key from bit sequences without the public-key authentication, digital signature, or key distribution center of the other party. We implemented real-world experiments using commercial off-the-shelf 802.11n devices to evaluate the performance of KEEP in various scenarios. Theoretical analysis and experimental verification show that KEEP is more secure, effective, and reliable than the state-of-the-art methods.
For secure communication, we need random cryptographic keys. However, the sensor node which is slow processing device which is not able to perform the operations those generates a complex public key. Also, they cannot generate the good random number generator which is useful for key generation. This problem is solved by doing the measurements of per-packet signal strength which helps us to generate secret keys. The packet strength of another device as one of the sources of randomness is received using this generator. We can also use as a bidirectional synchronized transmission of constant bit rate (CBR) between two parties. Here one device stand on the surface and other devices moves around it. The each device can receive the result of source of randomness from the per-packet power. It also provides security from a third party. A third party cannot extract the information from the per-packet signal measurement generated by any devices if, it is not located near any transceiver's location or standing devices. Here results of the solution in network simulator NS-2 also present.