A Physical-Layer Key Generation Approach Based on Received Signal Strength in Smart Homes

Abstract

Due to the characteristics of wireless network transmission, smart home devices are vulnerable to malicious attacks. Malicious attackers can not only intercept the transmission data of smart home devices to grasp the user’s personal privacy information but also can eavesdrop the transmission between devices to forge the user’s legal information. These attacks have brought great security risks to people’s daily lives. In order to ensure the security of transmitted data, establishing keys for smart home devices is necessary. In this article, an adaptive physical-layer key generation scheme based on received signal strength (RSS) is proposed in Smart Homes. The scheme performs group quantization and adaptive quantization on the collected RSS measurements. The design of group quantization improves the randomness of the generated keys and makes 0 and 1 in generated keys more evenly distributed. The advantage of adaptive quantization is to design adaptive quantization intervals. The smart home devices can select the appropriate quantized reference levels according to the RSS measurements in different scenarios. In order to verify the practicability of the key generation scheme, we analyze the performance of the proposed scheme in static and dynamic scenarios. In addition, this scheme is compared with other key generation schemes from various performance indicators. The comparison results show that our scheme is better than other schemes in terms of randomness.