Group-Based Key Exchange for Medical IoT Device-to-Device Communication (D2D) Combining Secret Sharing and Physical Layer Key Exchange

Abstract

Proximity based D2D communication is expected to be an essential part of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the future cellular networks as it will reduce the packet transmission delay for the ultra-low latency communication scenarios in addition to the higher bandwidth and significant Quality of Service (QoS). This will provide an opportunity for health monitoring devices to have a direct cellular D2D communication capability so that the data can be transmitted between the medical devices in short range, without using the data transmission through the base station (BS) from the cellular infrastructure. However, secure communication between these devices could be a major challenge to resist a variety of attack as the security procedures will no longer be assisted by the base station. The establishment of a secure communication link between these devices requires an authenticated key exchange protocol especially in a group-based communication scenario where designing a secure group based key exchange technique is still an open research issue. Therefore, this paper proposes an information-theoretically secure key management protocol suitable for the low-constrained IoT D2D communication. The focus of this research is to design a group key exchange protocol that integrates the physical layer key exchange technique (PLKE) with the cryptographic secret sharing approach that enables a reduction in computational complexity of the proposed protocol. It also aims to design an RF fingerprinting Intrusion detection system that can extract, and process features from the communicating signals to generate a fingerprint for each medical IoT device during the key exchange process in a D2D communication scenario to prevent device spoofing attacks. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) fall detection is considered as a reference scenario for group-based communication in which devices might need to communicate to avoid any false positives and to detect the actual state of the patient.