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Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies

Phase‐assisted NOMA based key distribution for IoT networks

Tasneem Alshamaseen, Saud Althunibat, Marwa Qaraqe, Haitham A. Alasha'ary

Published Feb 1, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) technology has recently been adopted in different fields and applications. An IoT network allows for a large set of physical objects (or devices) with various technologies to work together and exchange a large amount of information. This, however, raises different security and privacy concerns, including the confidentiality of the exchanged data. Usually, data confidentiality is maintained in wireless networks utilizing data encryption using a pre‐shared secret key. Thus, protecting the key distribution process is essential to maintaining a secure network. However, due to the typically large size of IoT networks, conventional secret key distribution schemes are unsuitable and lead to resource inefficiency. Therefore, in this paper, an efficient key distribution scheme is proposed by using physical‐layer security concepts. Specifically, non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is utilized to distribute the key to multiple nodes in a resource‐efficient manner. Moreover, the instantaneous channel phase is also used to attain a secure distribution in which each node can obtain its own key only. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of the key error rate at both a legitimate node and an eavesdropper under different channel fading models, where closed form mathematical expressions are derived and verified via simulation results.

DOI
10.1002/ett.4738

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Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) technology has recently been adopted in different fields and applications. An IoT network allows for a large set of physical objects (or devices) with various technologies to work together and exchange a large amount of information. This, however, raises different security and privacy concerns, including the confidentiality of the exchanged data. Usually, data confidentiality is maintained in wireless networks utilizing data encryption using a pre‐shared secret key. Thus, protecting the key distribution process is essential to maintaining a secure network. However, due to the typically large size of IoT networks, conventional secret key distribution schemes are unsuitable and lead to resource inefficiency. Therefore, in this paper, an efficient key distribution scheme is proposed by using physical‐layer security concepts. Specifically, non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is utilized to distribute the key to multiple nodes in a resource‐efficient manner. Moreover, the instantaneous channel phase is also used to attain a secure distribution in which each node can obtain its own key only. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of the key error rate at both a legitimate node and an eavesdropper under different channel fading models, where closed form mathematical expressions are derived and verified via simulation results.
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.
In Internet of Things (IoT), a massive amount of sensitive data is generated and transmitted by IoT devices. Security risks represent a major concern in IoT, especially when using innovative techniques such as Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) technique, where users can access other users’ data. In fact, in NOMA-based IoT systems, communication is not only threatened by external eavesdroppers, but also by untrusted internal users. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt an encryption technique that guarantees IoT system communications. This paper presents a comparative study of secret key generation, where performance analysis of secure NOMA-enabled IoT network in the presence of untrusted users is detailed using different PLS key generation schemes.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a popular technology that refers to a network of internet-connected physical devices that interact to perform tasks with minimal human intervention. However, as these networks expand, ensuring their security becomes challenging due to the communication broadcasting nature and extensive data exchanges. Traditional cryptographic security methods may not be optimal due to the constrained resources of loT devices. In this study, we propose a novel secure key distribution scheme from a physical layer perspective suitable for an loT environment. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the availability of Channel State Information (CSI) at both ends of the communication to enhance security. Specifically, CSI is utilized to precode the key symbols during the key distribution process. Additionally, the scheme employs the xor operation to add an extra layer of difficulty for potential eavesdroppers that attempt to retrieve the transmitted key symbols. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of Key Error Rate (KER) at legitimate nodes and eavesdroppers by using Monte Carlo simulations.
With a massive amount of wireless sensor nodes in Internet of Things (IoT), it is difficult to establish key distribution and management mechanism for traditional encryption technology. Alternatively, the physical layer key generation technology is promising to implement in IoT, since it is based on the principle of information-theoretical security and has the advantage of low complexity. Most existing key generation schemes assume that eavesdropping channels are independent of legitimate channels, which may not be practical especially when eavesdropper nodes are near to legitimate nodes. However, this paper investigates key generation problems for a multi-relay wireless network in IoT, where the correlation between eavesdropping and legitimate channels are considered. Key generation schemes are proposed for both non-colluding and partially colluding eavesdroppers situations. The main idea is to divide the key agreement process into three phases: 1) we first generate a secret key by exploiting the difference between the random channels associated with each relay node and the eavesdropping channels; 2) another key is generated by integrating the residual common randomness associated with each relay pair; 3) the two keys generated in the first two phases are concatenated into the final key. The secrecy key performance of the proposed key generation schemes is also derived with closed-forms.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to provide ubiquitous wireless machine-type communication devices and extensive information collection, resulting in an unprecedented amount of privacy and secrets exposed to the radio space. Security issues become a major restriction on the further development of IoT. However, secure transmissions in IoT are challenged by low complexity limitation and massive connectivity demand, especially by the use of short packets, which are expected to satisfy the delay requirement in ultra-reliable low-latency communications. Physical layer security can be employed without the constraints of packet length and number of connections. Nevertheless, due to the limitations of complexity, not all existing PLS techniques can be adopted in IoT. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique for increasing connectivity and reducing delay. Assuming an eavesdropper (Eve) is capable of the same detection capability as legitimate users, this article further exploits the inherent characteristics of NOMA to secure short-packet communications in IoT networks without introducing extra security mechanisms. Both downlink and uplink NOMA schemes are introduced to secure transmission by deliberately increasing the co-channel interference at Eve, which can be viewed as a special cooperative jamming strategy. Simulations show that in both uplink and downlink, although secrecy performance deteriorates in short-packet communications, the performance gains of NOMA over traditional orthogonal multiple access are significant. Finally, we analyze the challenges and future trends in this emerging area.
The growth of internet-of-things (IoT) inspired use cases in different run of the mill environments such as cities, industries, healthcare, agriculture, and transportation, has led to a greater desire for safer IoT data gathering and storage. However, securing IoT is challenging due to form-factor, complexity, energy, and connectivity limitations. Conventional coding-based security techniques are unsuitable for ultra-reliable low-latency and energy-efficient communication in IoT. Numerous research studies on physical layer security (PLS) techniques for fifth generation (5G) have emerged recently, but not all of the solutions can be used in IoT networks due to complexity limitations. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is billed as a possible technology to solve connectivity and latency requirements in IoT. In this study, we exploit the power allocation characteristics of NOMA to enhance security in a downlink deviceto-device (D2D) decode and forward (DF) IoT network infiltrated by an eavesdropper. Our performance metric of choice is the secrecy outage probability (SOP). We formulate exact SOP results for different users. Simulation results demonstrate the positive impact of NOMA on SOP in a D2D IoT-NOMA network.