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Future Generation Computer Systems

FLoRa: Sequential fuzzy extractor based physical layer key generation for LPWAN

Biao Han, Yahui Li, Xiaoyan Wang, Hanxun Li, Jinsen Huang

Published Oct 23, 2022• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The security of Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) mainly relies on encryption for ensuring packet integrity and confidentiality. Unfortunately, the latest LPWAN specifications refrain from specifying how to distribute keys for encryption. In this paper, we tackle this problem via physical layer security, which exploits the channel characteristics to generate secret keys at the physical layer. In order to generate consistent keys from noisy feature sources and to achieve high reconciliation success rate, we propose FLoRa, a physical layer key generation system for LPWAN based on sequential fuzzy extractor. An adaptive multi-bit quantization algorithm is first proposed to generate the initial key, which accelerates the bit generation rate at the start-up procedure. We then design a novel fuzzy extractor by sequentially slicing the initial key, which improves the reconciliation success rate, as well as reduces the key reconciliation time. We implement FLoRa in a LoRaWAN based network prototype and evaluate it by conducting extensive indoor and outdoor experiments. Experimental results reveal that FLoRa is capable of generating consistent secret keys with high key generation performance in both static and dynamic network environments.

DOI
10.1016/j.future.2022.10.018

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The security of Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) mainly relies on encryption for ensuring packet integrity and confidentiality. Unfortunately, the latest LPWAN specifications refrain from specifying how to distribute keys for encryption. In this paper, we tackle this problem via physical layer security, which exploits the channel characteristics to generate secret keys at the physical layer. In order to generate consistent keys from noisy feature sources and to achieve high reconciliation success rate, we propose FLoRa, a physical layer key generation system for LPWAN based on sequential fuzzy extractor. An adaptive multi-bit quantization algorithm is first proposed to generate the initial key, which accelerates the bit generation rate at the start-up procedure. We then design a novel fuzzy extractor by sequentially slicing the initial key, which improves the reconciliation success rate, as well as reduces the key reconciliation time. We implement FLoRa in a LoRaWAN based network prototype and evaluate it by conducting extensive indoor and outdoor experiments. Experimental results reveal that FLoRa is capable of generating consistent secret keys with high key generation performance in both static and dynamic network environments.
Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) has emerged as the dominant open specification in recent years due to its ability to offer affordable connectivity to the low-power devices distributed over large geographical areas. However, security issues have not been fully addressed in LPWAN specifications, especially, key distribution and key management. Physical layer key generation, which exploits wireless channel reciprocity and randomness to generate secure keys, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we exploit the physical layer key generation problem in LPWAN communication and present a distributed and lightweight key generation scheme for Long Range (LoRa) based network. It explores the shared randomness extracted from measured RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) as consensus information to generate secure keys. To negotiate the RSSI signal as a bidirectional consistent key sequence, we propose a novel level-crossing quantization algorithm with an improved Cascade key agreement protocol to improve the key generation rate, as well as to avoid information leakage during transmission. We implement the proposed physical layer key generation scheme in a LoRa network prototype. Then we conduct extensive experiments in stationary and mobile indoor environments to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed key generation scheme. Experimental results show that its achievable key rate can reach 29.5% in stationary scenario and 35.5% in mobile scenario. Its key generation rate can exceed 1 bit/s with a lightweight implementation on the LoRa network prototype. For the 128-bit key sequence, it passes the the NIST suite of statistical tests.
Physical layer key generation that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Despite much research efforts in this field, the problem of wireless key generation at long distance and low data rate remains unknown and has not been studied. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis in real indoor and outdoor environments to explore the feasibility of wireless key generation for Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). Based on the results, we present LoRa-Key, the first complete key establishment protocol for LoRaWAN by exploring the shared randomness extracted from measured Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). LoRa-Key employs a number of signal processing techniques to improve key generation rate significantly. Experimental results show that LoRa-Key can achieve key establishment rates of 13 bit/s in stationary scenario and 21 bit/s in mobile scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies key generation protocol for LoRaWAN.
Physical layer key generation based on reciprocal and random wireless channels has been an attractive solution for securing resource-constrained low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs). When quantizing channel measurements, namely received signal strength indicator (RSSI), into key bits, the existing works mainly adopt fixed quantization levels and guard band parameters, which fail to fully extract keys from RSSI measurements. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive quantization scheme for key generation in LPWANs, taking LoRa as a case study. The proposed adaptive quantization scheme can dynamically adjust the quantization parameters according to the randomness of RSSI measurements estimated by Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ76), while ensuring a predefined key disagreement ratio (KDR). Specifically, our scheme uses pre-trained linear regression models to determine the appropriate quantization level and guard band parameter for each segment of RSSI measurements. Moreover, we propose a guard band parameter calibration scheme during information reconciliation during real-time key generation operation. Experimental evaluations using LoRa devices show that the proposed adaptive quantization scheme outperforms the benchmark differential quantization and fixed quantization with up to 2.35×\times× and 1.51×\times× key generation rate (KGR) gains, respectively.
Physical layer security (PLS) can be used to pro-vide keyless and innately secure communications by exploiting the propagation characteristics of the wireless channel at the physical layer (PHY) layer to co-generate cipher keys for symmetric encryption. While existing methods use channel state information as input for secret key generation, we consider a novel approach that derives features from frequency-time domain representation of in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples to derive initial keys with high agreement rate. A recurrent neural network (RNN) with a quadruplet loss function is trained based on spectrograms collected from bi-directional time-division duplex channel probing between the two parties and on spectrograms collected from a passive eavesdropper. Information reconciliation is achieved using Reed Solomon codes. At the last step of the protocol, a 512-bit cryptographic key is generated by feeding the reconciled bit sequence to the Secure Hash Algorithm 3. Our experiments with software-defined radios in both indoor and outdoor environments evaluate the proposed key generation system under different channel propagation environments and hardware inaccuracies. We demonstrate that the proposed RNN-assisted channel feature extractor trained on indoor channel probe data operates successfully in two outdoor setups and produces up to 70 amplified keys out of 100 probes exchanged between two trusted parties i.e., Alice and Bob, while the passive eavesdropper fails to directly predict any of the generated keys.
The wireless secret key agreement offers information theoretic secrecy with potential for low energy implementations. However, the presented works have concentrated mainly on wireless technologies such as 802.11 or 802.15.4, which are suitable for small scale local networks. This paper gives the first insights on how to establish LoRa based secret key agreement for low-power widea area networks (LPWAN). In particular: 1) characterization of LoRa parameter influence on the key agreement 2) comparison between available channel probing methods and 3) evaluation of several wireless scenarios with off-the-shelf LoRa devices, have been conducted to reveal the optimal hardware settings and the key generation performance. The main results indicate that the instantaneous RSSI measurement capability leads in most cases to lower key disagreement and higher key entropy. A further outcome shows that strong secret keys can be extracted from LoRa node-gateway communication, even when the devices are stationary.
Physical-layer security (PLS) schemes use the randomness of the channel parameters, namely, channel state information (CSI) and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to generate the secret keys. There has been limited work in PLS schemes in long-range (LoRa) wide-area networks (LoRaWANs) which hinder their widespread application. Limitations observed in existing studies include the requirement of high correlation between channel parameter measurements for secret key generation in the proposed schemes and the evaluation of the schemes has only been done in either fully indoor or outdoor environments. The real-world wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and LoRa use cases might not meet both requirements thus making the current PLS schemes inappropriate for these systems. By considering the limitations found in existing PLS schemes, this article proposes LoRA-LiSK, a practical and efficient shared secret key generation scheme for LoRa networks. Our proposed LoRa-LiSK scheme consists of several preprocessing techniques (timestamp matching, two sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, and a Savitzky–Golay filter), multilevel quantization, information reconciliation using Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, and finally, privacy amplification using secure hash algorithm SHA-2. The LoRa-LiSK scheme is extensively evaluated on real WSN/IoT devices in practical application scenarios: 1) indoor to outdoor and 2) LoRa static and mobile outdoor links. It outperforms existing schemes by generating keys with channel parameter measurements of low correlation values (0.2–0.6), while still essentially achieving high key generation rates, and low key disagreement rates (10%–20%). The scheme updates a key in approximately 1 h using an application profile with high transmission rate compared to 3 h reported by existing works while still respecting the duty cycle regulation. It also incurs less communication overhead compared to the existing works.