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IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking

A Novel Physical Layer Secret Key Generation Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Mehmet Ali Aygtil, Hakan Ali Çırpan, Hüseyin Arslan

Published Jun 24, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are indispensable across various applications, from environmental surveillance to indus-trial automation, owing to their ability to collect and transmit data autonomously. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless systems, these systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. Recently, channel-based secret key generation methods have been widely used in the literature. In these methods, Alice and Bob generate random signals and share these signals with each other. Then, using the secret key paired multiplication with the channel between them, a secret key is shared between legitimate users, while illegitimate nodes cannot access the key. However, these methods consider only two users. This paper proposes a novel method for multiple users. Extensive simulation proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. However, when the number of users increases, the performance of the proposed method decreases.

DOI
10.1109/blackseacom61746.2024.10646260

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Wireless sensor networks are indispensable across various applications, from environmental surveillance to indus-trial automation, owing to their ability to collect and transmit data autonomously. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless systems, these systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. Recently, channel-based secret key generation methods have been widely used in the literature. In these methods, Alice and Bob generate random signals and share these signals with each other. Then, using the secret key paired multiplication with the channel between them, a secret key is shared between legitimate users, while illegitimate nodes cannot access the key. However, these methods consider only two users. This paper proposes a novel method for multiple users. Extensive simulation proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. However, when the number of users increases, the performance of the proposed method decreases.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are resource-constrained and highly vulnerable to eavesdropping due to their broadcast nature. Traditional symmetric key cryptography provides strong security but imposes excessive computational and energy demands on sensor nodes. Physical layer–based secret key generation (SKG) offers a lightweight alternative by exploiting channel reciprocity and randomness; however, existing methods are mostly limited to two-user scenarios and lack scalability in multi-user settings. This paper introduces two scalable multi-user SKG frameworks: a sequential method and a star topology-based method. In the sequential method, users cooperatively relay random signals to derive a shared key, while the star topology leverages a central node for signal aggregation and redistribution. A comparative analysis reveals trade-offs between the proposed methods. The sequential method is more computationally efficient but sensitive to node failures, while the star topology offers lower delay at the cost of requiring a fully connected central node. Analyses and simulations confirm both methods’ effectiveness in key mismatch probability, key generation rate, and key randomness validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology test suite.
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.
Future sensor networks require energy and bandwidth efficient designs to support the growing number of nodes. The security aspect is often neglected due to the extra computational burden imposed on the sensor nodes. In this article, we propose a secret key generation method for wireless sensor networks by using the physical layer features. This key generation method is based on the superposition property of wireless channels. The proposed method exploits the multiple access property of the wireless channel with simultaneous transmissions as in theanalog function computationtechnique to solve the latency and scarce bandwidth problems of highly populated dense networks. All nodes use the same time and frequency block to provide scalability that islinearly proportionalto the number of nodes. The proposed method also benefits from the network density to provide security against eavesdroppers that aim to sniff the secret key from the channel. The security of the proposed method against eavesdroppers is analytically studied. Moreover, their application in multiple layers is investigated. The presented results have shown that there is a tradeoff between the total power consumption and total used bandwidth for secret key generation. Lastly, the error probability of the generated keys due to thermal noise and channel estimation error is investigated with computer simulations and compared with broadcasting-based benchmark model.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, wireless communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping, message modification, and node impersonation. Securing the wireless communication requires the shared secret keys between the communicating entities. Traditional security schemes rely on public key infrastructures and cryptographic algorithms to manage secret keys. Recently, many physical-layer-based methods have been proposed as alternative solutions for key generation in wireless networks. These methods exploit the inherent randomness of the wireless fading channel to generate secret keys while providing information-theoretical security without intensive cryptographic computations. This article provides an overview of the existing PHY-based key generation schemes exploiting the randomness of the wireless channels. Specifically, we first introduce the fundamental and general framework of the PHY-based key generation schemes and then categorize them into two classes: received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. Finally, we present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.
Secret key generation based on channel characteristics is an effective physical-layer security method for 5G wireless networks. The issues of how to ensure the high key generation rate and correlation of the secret key under active attack are needed to be addressed. In this paper, a new practical secret key generation scheme with high rate and correlation is proposed. In our proposed scheme, Alice and Bob transmit independent random sequences instead of known training sequences or probing signals; neither Alice nor Bob can decode these random sequences or estimate the channel. User's random sequences together with the channel effects are used as common random source to generate the secret key. With this solution, legitimate users are able to share secret keys with sufficient length and high security under active attack. We evaluate the proposed scheme through both analytic and simulation studies. The results show that our proposed scheme achieves high key generation rate and key security, and is suitable for 5G wireless networks with resource-constrained devices.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in different disciplines, including transportation systems, agriculture field environment monitoring, healthcare systems, and industrial monitoring. The security challenge of the wireless communication link between sensor nodes is critical in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a new physical layer secret-key generation scheme for transportation security sensor network. The scheme is based on the cooperation of all the sensor nodes, thus avoiding the key distribution process, which increases the security of the system. Different passive and active attack models are analyzed in this paper. We also prove that when the cooperative node number is large enough, even when the eavesdropper is equipped with multiple antennas, the secret-key is still secure. Numerical results are performed to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme.