A New Frontier for IoT Security Emerging From Three Decades of Key Generation Relying on Wireless Channels

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a transformative technology, which is revolutionizing our everyday life by connecting everyone and everything together. The massive number of devices are preferably connected wirelessly because of the easy installment and flexible deployment. However, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes the information accessible to everyone including malicious users, which should hence be protected by encryption. Unfortunately, the secure and efficient provision of cryptographic keys for low-cost IoT devices is challenging; weak keys have resulted in severe security breaches, as evidenced by numerous notorious cyberattacks. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of lightweight security solutions conceived for IoT, relying on key generation from wireless channels. We first introduce the key generation fundamentals and protocols. We then examine how to apply this emerging technique to secure IoT and demonstrate that key generation relying on the randomness of wireless channels is eminently suitable for IoT. This paper reviews the extensive research efforts in the areas of theoretical modelling, simulation based validation and experimental exploration. We finally discuss the hurdles and challenges that key generation is facing and suggest future work to make key generation a reliable and secure solution to safeguard the IoT.

CPS Attacks Mitigation Approaches on Power Electronic Systems With Security Challenges for Smart Grid Applications: A Review

“…Exploiting the wireless capabilities to control the industrial control system application remotely [5], [157], [165], [212] Disturbing the industrial control system operation Physical threats Spoofing a temperature sensor in a specific environment [53], [39], [45], [63], [164] Sending deceptive, false measurements to the control center…”

“…This structure is significantly safe from the cyber-space aspect as the attackers cannot access the physical layer. Furthermore, beamforming is widely employed as suitable physical layer security [157]. Though, the decentralized control strategies undergo an operational perspective in matching the commercial, regulatory standards [158].…”

Artificially Time-Varying Differential MIMO for Achieving Practical Physical Layer Security

“…In the literature, several key generation methods have been proposed. They rely on the true randomness of wireless nature [19], with characteristics such as the random received signal strength (RSS) [60], the random channel coefficients [27], the diversity of MIMO [28], the MIMO channel fluctuations [29], and distributed antennas [61]. Most of these methods are highly reliable.…”

“…Key-based encryption techniques that rely on computational security may be cracked by future supercomputers [8,17,18]. In order to overcome this limitation, physical layer security (PLS) methods that frequently update private keys have been conceived [19], which rely on the true randomness of wireless channels. The information-theoretic foundation of secret-key agreement in public channels was first established by Maurer and Wolf [20][21][22].…”

Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification for Narrowband Systems, Modelling and Classification

“…Devices are conventionally authenticated by cryptographic schemes, which rely on a commonly preshared key and software address. However, key management and distribution become challenging for IoT devices, as many of them will be low-cost and distributed in remote areas [2]. Software address, such as MAC/IP address, is not encrypted and can be spoofed easily.…”