No abstract

Key management in wireless sensor networks faces several new challenges. The scale, resource limitations, and new threats such as node capture necessitate the use of an on-line key generation by the nodes themselves. However, the cost of such schemes is high since their secrecy is based on computational complexity. Recently, several research contributions justified that the wireless channel itself can be used to generate information-theoretic secure keys. By exchanging sampling messages during movement, a bit string can be derived that is only known to the involved entities. Yet, movement is not the only possibility to generate randomness. The channel response is also strongly dependent on the frequency of the transmitted signal. In our work, we introduce a protocol for key generation based on the frequency-selectivity of channel fading. The practical advantage of this approach is that we do not require node movement. Thus, the frequent case of a sensor network with static motes is supported. Furthermore, the error correction property of the protocol mitigates the effects of measurement errors and other temporal effects, giving rise to an agreement rate of over 97 %. We show the applicability of our protocol by implementing it on MICAz motes, and evaluate its robustness and secrecy through experiments and analysis.

No abstract

Generating secret keys using physical properties of the wireless channel has recently become a popular research area. The main security assumption of these protocols is that a sufficiently distant adversary is unable to guess a generated secret due to the unpredictable behavior of multipath signal propagation. In this paper, we introduce a practical and efficient man-in-the-middle attack against such protocols. Using this attack, we demonstrate: (i) intentional sabotaging of key generation schemes, which leads to a high key disagreement rate, and (ii) a key recovery that reveals up to 47 % of the generated secret bits. We analyze statistical countermeasures (often proposed in related work) and show that attempting to detect such attacks results in a high false positive rate, questioning the overall benefit of such schemes. We implement and experimentally validate the attacks using off-the-shelf hardware, without assuming any technological advantage for the adversary.

Key management in wireless sensor networks does not only face typical, but also several new challenges. The scale, resource limitations, and new threats such as node capture and compromise necessitate the use of an on-line key generation, where secret keys are generated by the nodes themselves. However, the cost of such schemes is high since their secrecy is based on computational complexity. Recently, several research contributions justified that the wireless channel itself can be used to generate information-theoretic secure keys between two parties. By exchanging sampling messages during movement, a bit string can be derived that is only known to the involved entities. Yet, movement is not the only possibility to generate randomness. The channel response is also strongly dependent on the frequency of the transmitted signal. In our work, we introduce a protocol for key generation based on the frequency-selectivity of channel fading. The great practical advantage of this approach is that we do not rely on node movement as the source of randomness. Thus, the frequent case of a sensor network with static motes is supported. Furthermore, the error correction property of the proposed protocol mitigates the effects of measurement errors and other temporal effects, giving rise to a key agreement rate of over 97%. We show the applicability of our protocol by implementing it on MICAz motes, and evaluate its robustness and secrecy through experiments and analysis.