Abstract
Cryptography is one of the most widely employed means to ensure confidentiality in the Internet of Things (IoT). Establishing cryptographically secure links between IoT devices requires the prior consensus to a secret encryption key. Yet, IoT devices are resource-constrained and cannot employ traditional key distribution schemes. As a result, there is a growing interest in generating secret random keys locally, using the shared randomness of the communicating channel. This article presents a secret key generation scheme, named SKYGlow, which is targeted at resource-constrained IoT platforms and tested on devices that employ IEEE 802.15.4 radios. We first examine the practical upper bounds of the number of secret bits that can be extracted from a message exchange. We contrast these upper bounds with the current state-of-the-art, and elaborate on the workings of the proposed scheme. SKYGlow applies the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) on channel observations of exchanged messages to reduce mismatches and increase correlation between the generated secret bits. We validate the performance of SKYGlow in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, at 2.4 GHz and 868 MHz respectively. The results suggest that SKYGlow can create secret 128-bit keys of 0.9978 bits entropy with just 65 packet exchanges, outperforming the state-of-the-art in terms of energy efficiency.
Highlights
As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes part of our every day lives, more physical objects are interconnected and remotely controllable through the Internet
Extending our previous work [11,12], this study considers two different scenarios that cover a wide range of IoT deployments: an indoor deployment operating at 2.4 GHz, and an outdoor deployment operating at 868 MHz
Cascade is unsuitable for energy-constrained IoT devices, at it requires a large number of message exchanges to operate [28]
Summary
As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes part of our every day lives, more physical objects are interconnected and remotely controllable through the Internet. This paradigm introduces new security risks, allowing malicious users to gain access to objects and information that are traditionally considered secure [1]. A large number of these objects are connected using wireless technology, which makes the communications vulnerable to eavesdropping. This highlights the need for confidentiality, which is typically realised through encryption schemes. There is research interest in creating resource-efficient secu-
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