A Channel Magnitude Based Key Generation Scheme for Static and Dynamic Environments

Abstract

The physical characteristics of the wireless channel can be exploited to secure communication within Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature; however, the feasibility of such techniques in IoT environments remains unclear. 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. On the other hand, in some cases IoT devices are deployed in dynamic environments wherein the channel properties changes very fast over the time. Key generation schemes proposed for one environment are not directly applicable to the other. While low key generation rate (KGR) is an issue for static environments, higher values of bit error rate (BER) becomes a bottleneck in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a mapping-table based key distribution scheme for IoT networks deployed in both static and dynamic environments. In the proposed scheme, the channel magnitude is exploited in the key generation process. The proposed scheme is immune to channel estimation errors, while providing sufficient randomness in the static environment.