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Efficient and Practical Physical-Layer Group Key Generation for Resource-Constrained Wireless Iot Devices

Kemedi Moara-Nkwe, Qi Shi, Mahmoud Hashem Eiza, Nathan Shone, Bo Zhou

Published Jan 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.2139/ssrn.4756197

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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.
Wireless communication systems are becoming increasingly important in our daily lives, especially with the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). Secure and reliable communication is essential for the correct functioning of critical applications and use cases such as healthcare, finance, transportation, and industrial automation. However, the growing number of connected devices introduces significant challenges to data security and privacy due to the open nature of wireless networks. While traditional encryption methods are effective, they can be resource-intensive and impractical for resource-constrained IoT environments. Physical layer security (PLS) provides a lightweight alternative by leveraging the inherent characteristics of wireless channels to generate symmetric secret keys without requiring third-party infrastructure. The PLS key generation process involves four main stages: channel sampling, quantization, reconciliation, and privacy amplification. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing quantization schemes, as this step plays a crucial role in determining the key generation rate (KGR) and key disagreement rate (KDR). Additionally, the paper classifies quantization methods as either lossless or lossy, providing insights into the trade-offs between security and efficiency.