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International journal of intelligent engineering and systems

Enhancement of Physical Layer Security in LoRa Networks Using Optimal Key Generation

Published Oct 25, 2024• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physical Layer Security (PLS) uses channel parameters to generate secret keys to secure communications between legitimate users.However, implementing PLS on Long Range (LoRa) networks faces challenges such as low reciprocity, a trade-off between key disagreement and generation rates, and limited key randomness due to the many LoRa network implementations on fixed networks.This research introduced a new method for choosing optimal window lengths in Savitzky-Golay filters combined with modified SKYGlow quantizations, outperforming previous works that did not use optimal window lengths and used 4-ary quantization.Experimental results show a significant increase, with the key generation rate reaching 6.9537 bps and decreasing the key disagreement rate to 0.07827.Thus, generating a key of 128 bits takes only 18.4 s.This research significantly contributes to developing more reliable and secure SKG techniques on LoRa networks.

DOI
10.22266/ijies2024.1231.42

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Physical Layer Security (PLS) uses channel parameters to generate secret keys to secure communications between legitimate users.However, implementing PLS on Long Range (LoRa) networks faces challenges such as low reciprocity, a trade-off between key disagreement and generation rates, and limited key randomness due to the many LoRa network implementations on fixed networks.This research introduced a new method for choosing optimal window lengths in Savitzky-Golay filters combined with modified SKYGlow quantizations, outperforming previous works that did not use optimal window lengths and used 4-ary quantization.Experimental results show a significant increase, with the key generation rate reaching 6.9537 bps and decreasing the key disagreement rate to 0.07827.Thus, generating a key of 128 bits takes only 18.4 s.This research significantly contributes to developing more reliable and secure SKG techniques on LoRa networks.
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.
Physical layer key generation technology which leverages channel randomness to generate secret keys has attracted extensive attentions in long range (LoRa)-based networks recently. We in this paper develop a software-defined radio (SDR) based LoRa communications platform using GNU Radio on universal software radio peripheral (USRP) to implement and evaluate typical physical layer key generation schemes. Thanks to the flexibility and configurability of GNU Radio to extract LoRa packets, we are able to obtain the fine-grained channel frequency response (CFR) through LoRa preamble based channel estimation for key generation. Besides, we propose a low-complexity preprocessing method to enhance the randomness of quantization while reducing the secret key disagreement ratio. The results indicate that we can achieve 367 key bits with a high level of randomness through just a single effective channel probing in an indoor environment at a distance of 2 meters under the circumstance of a spreading factor (SF) of 7, a preamble length of 8, a signal bandwidth of 250 kHz, and a sampling rate of 1 MHz.
The rapid technological advancements in wireless networks have resulted in tremendous increase in the number of connected user and machine-type wireless devices. Physical Layer Security (PLS) has a strong potential for providing security to wireless links in massively connected future wireless networks. The key-based PLS methods aim at generating secret key bits for data encryption/decryption at the legitimate communication nodes by exploiting the randomness inherent in wireless channels. This work proposes a novel secret key-bits extraction algorithm named Moving-Window Wrapped-Envelope Secret Key Generation (MWWE-SKG). The proposed algorithm uses first-order statistics from a sliding temporal window of channel samples to select the channel quantization interval for each window from circularly wrapped channel envelope samples. The differences in hardware noise conditions at the legitimate nodes lead to differences in the measurement of ideally reciprocal channels, which further leads to a mismatch in the generated secret key bits, whereas the channel statistics of the same links are more likely to remain unchanged for a reasonably large length of time window over the channel samples. An extensive analysis on the performance of the proposed algorithm is conducted, where the proposed algorithm is observed to provide a promising trade-off between the critical SKG performance metrics namely the Key Generation Rate (KGR), Bit Mismatch Probability (BMP), and the Key Randomness Property (KRP). Furthermore, a comparative performance analysis of the proposed algorithm with other notable techniques is also conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.
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 (LoRa)-based network. Our experimental results show that: 1) the low transmission rate will lead to low channel reciprocity which makes wireless key generation significantly challenging and 2) when the requirement of high reciprocity is fulfilled, two nodes can generate the same secret key even when they are far away from each other (a few kilometers). Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, we present LoRa-Key, the first complete key establishment protocol for LoRa network by exploring the shared randomness extracted from measured received signal strength indicator. LoRa-Key employs a number of signal processing techniques to improve key generation rate significantly. Moreover, we propose a novel compressive sensing-based reconciliation framework to reduce mismatch rate. Experimental results show that LoRa-Key can achieve key establishment rates of 18 bit/s in stationary scenario and 31 bit/s in mobile scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies key generation protocol for LoRa network.
With the advent of innovative wireless technologies and the rapid growth of diverse connected devices, ensuring communication security has become a critical challenge for the future massively connected beyond 5th generation (B5G) wireless networks. The physical layer security (PLS) approach leverages the inherent physical medium characteristics of communication networks to provide secure communications. In particular, the wireless channel-based secret key generation (SKG) is a PLS approach that creates symmetric keys for message encryption/decryption by exploiting the randomness inherent in wireless channels while relying on the channel to be reciprocal between the nodes. This work proposes a novel SKG algorithm that emphasizes the pre-processing and quantization stages with the aim to increase the key generation rate (KGR) and the key agreement rate (KAR) between the legitimate nodes. The algorithm employs biasing of selective samples and sliding-window weighted averaging of the Generalized Gamma fading channel samples based on the channel’s average contiguous duration (ACD) metric, a second-order fading statistic, to enhance the channel reciprocity. The proposed scheme may also be used to improve the key randomness rate (KRR) by using a non-contiguous multi-level quantization strategy that evenly sets the quantization intervals to accommodate a similar number of channel samples across these intervals. Thus, a desired trade-off between the KGR, KAR, and KRR to meet operational requirements can be achieved with the proposed scheme. Finally, a comprehensive analysis of the performance gains of the proposed scheme in relation to other notable works is conducted by investigating the impact of several channel and algorithmic parameters on the KGR, KAR, and KRR of these schemes.