An Adaptive Physical Layer Key Extraction Scheme for Smart Homes

Abstract

The wireless transmission of home area networks contributes to the vulnerabilities of smart homes. As a result, smart homes are vulnerable to malicious attacks like eavesdropping. To secure the transmissions, secret keys should be established for smart home devices. In practical smart home applications, smart home devices might be resource-constrained devices. Thus, the lightweight key establishment schemes are preferred. Typically, lightweight physical layer key extraction schemes can be employed by the smart home devices. However, the key generation rate of the schemes is low. To improve the key generation rate, in this paper we propose an adaptive physical layer key extraction scheme for smart homes by making use of the Received Signal Strength (RSS). Specifically, in our scheme, two smart home devices collect the RSS measurements by probing with each other. Then, the collected measurements are quantized by running the proposed Self-adaptive Lossless Quantization algorithm. Completing these operations, the two smart home devices can obtain the secret key. In our scheme, we design the self-adaptive lossless quantization algorithm to improve the key generation rate. To show the practicality of the new scheme, we implement it using the Ralink WiFi cards. Additionally, we analyse the performance of our scheme and compare it with that of other related works.