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IEEE Communications Letters

Efficient Key Extraction for Secure Vehicular Communication Through OTFS

Agnes Francis Kawoya, Hua Wang, Mohammed Salah Abood

Published Jan 5, 2024• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Vehicular communication is delay sensitive and demands high security. However, the time for key establishment between node pairs is limited due to the unique features of fast-moving and high dynamics in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Moreover, under high-mobility scenarios, the communication performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals degrades significantly, while Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) signals maintains better performance. Towards this end, considering the time for key establishment, we propose an efficient physical layer secret key generation (PLSKG) scheme utilizing OTFS channel state information (CSI). First, we preprocess the estimated CSI with a moving average coding (MAC) algorithm to improve channel reciprocity. Next, we adopt a bidirectional difference quantization (BDQ) for increased key bit generation and propose a one-way reconciliation protocol to remove bit mismatch. Results from extensive simulations have verified that our scheme achieves random 0-b disagreement keys with a high key generation rate and reduced time for key establishment compared to other schemes.

DOI
10.1109/lcomm.2024.3350121

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Vehicular communication is delay sensitive and demands high security. However, the time for key establishment between node pairs is limited due to the unique features of fast-moving and high dynamics in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Moreover, under high-mobility scenarios, the communication performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals degrades significantly, while Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) signals maintains better performance. Towards this end, considering the time for key establishment, we propose an efficient physical layer secret key generation (PLSKG) scheme utilizing OTFS channel state information (CSI). First, we preprocess the estimated CSI with a moving average coding (MAC) algorithm to improve channel reciprocity. Next, we adopt a bidirectional difference quantization (BDQ) for increased key bit generation and propose a one-way reconciliation protocol to remove bit mismatch. Results from extensive simulations have verified that our scheme achieves random 0-b disagreement keys with a high key generation rate and reduced time for key establishment compared to other schemes.
Physical layer key generation (PLKG) has emerged as a promising strategy for securing wireless communication using shared channel knowledge between two legitimate users. Traditional PLKG systems rely on time-frequency domain channels using metrics such as Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) or Channel State Information (CSI) to generate secure keys. As a result of the rapid variation in the time-frequency domain channels, these systems are prone to error and suffer from a high reconciliation overhead requirement. Conversely, the same channels have a sparse and static representation in the delay-Doppler domain, which is utilized by the recently introduced Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation scheme. Furthermore, the channel representation in the delay-Doppler domain is uniquely determined by the scattering environment between the transmitter-receiver pair. In this paper, we leverage the sparsity of the delay-Doppler domain channel as well as the uniqueness of the channel representation to introduce two OTFS based PLKG schemes. We show through extensive simulations that the introduced OTFS schemes can get < 10% bit disagreement ratio (BDR) in scenarios where time-frequency domain based RSSI methods break down.
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.
Due to the reciprocity of wireless channels, the communication parties can directly extract the shared key from channel. This solution were verified through several schemes. However, in real situations, channel sampling of legitimate transceivers might be impacted by noises and other interferences, which makes the channel states obtained by initiator and responder might be obvious different. The efficiency and even availability of physical layer key generation are thus reduced. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient physical layer key generation scheme, which extract shared secret keys from channel state information (CSI). To improve the key generation process, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is employed to reduce differences of channel states of legitimate transceivers. Then, these outputs are quantified and encoded through multi-bit adaptive quantization(MAQ) quantizer and gray code to generate binary bit sequence, which can greatly reduce the bit error rate. Moreover, the low density parity check (LDPC) code and universal hashing functions are used to achieve information reconciliation and privacy amplifification. By adding preprocessing methods in the key generation process and using the rich information of CSI, the security of communications can be increased on the basis of improving the key generation rate. To evaluate this scheme, a number of experiments in various real environments are conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effificiently generate shared secret keys for nodes and protect their communication.
This letter presents a physical layer secret key generation (PLSKG) protocol utilizing the amplitude of channel frequency response (CFR) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers. Firstly, least squares estimation estimates the CFR. Next, a partition moving average (PMA) algorithm encodes the CFR. PMA re-uses the CFR within a partition by encoding at different overlap sizes, thus increasing the key generation rate (KGR). Then, a 2-bit differential-based quantization at every overlap for each partition is followed for an improved KGR and randomness. Finally, a cyclic redundancy check is performed to select strings with consistent results as candidate key, eliminating streams from less correlated measurements, thus ensuring a 0-bit mismatch. Simulation results have verified that our scheme achieves random 0-bit disagreement keys with a high average key length and reduced complexity compared to the other existing lightweight schemes.
In this paper, a novel physical layer key generation method for extracting secret key from mutual channel information in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems has been proposed. Firstly, a well-designed data extraction process has been introduced to reduce the redundancy and inconsistency of channel state information (CSI). After that, a new quantization method using gray code is proposed. Furthermore, an associated method is designed to reduce key error rate (KER). With these improvements, higher key generation rate (KGR) can be obtained compared to existing methods. Finally, available secret keys have been generated after information reconciliation and privacy amplification. The proposed method has been analyzed and verified in long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) systems and the generated secret keys have passed randomness test.
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.