A Novel Physical Layer Key Generation and Authenticated Encryption Protocol Exploiting Shared Randomness

The use of wireless networks for communication has grown significantly in recent times, and continues to develop further. The broadcast nature of wireless communications makes them susceptible to a wide variety of security attacks. Unlike traditional solutions, which usually handle security at the application layer, the primary concern of this dissertation is to analyse and develop solutions for secure communication using channel coding techniques at the physical-layer. The topic of physical layer authenticated encryption using high rate key generation through shared randomness is investigated in this work. First, a physical layer secret key generation scheme is discussed exploiting channel reciprocity in wireless systems. In order to address the susceptibility of this family of schemes to active attacks, a novel physical layer authentication encryption protocol is presented along with its extension to multi-node networks in the presence of active adversaries. Unlike previous work in the area of generating secret keys through shared randomness, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is semantically secure with respect to chosen plaintext and chosen cipher text attacks. Secondly, in order to increase the rate in bits per seconds at which agreed cryptographic keys are been generated, a multi-level quantization algorithm with public feedback is discussed. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is superior to direct information distillation approaches and can substantially increase the key generation rates even at low and medium SNRs. Furthermore, the employment of this low-overhead feedback at the information distillation process can largely simplify the information reconciliation process. The proposed secret key generation schemes are tested for randomness such as required for cryptographic keys. The validation test is perfomed with the aid of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test suite. The P-values obtained in each of the test carried out indicates that the key sequence generated by our algorithm is random

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Authenticated secret key generation in delay-constrained wireless systems

With the emergence of 5G low-latency applications, such as haptics and V2X, low-complexity and low-latency security mechanisms are needed. Promising lightweight mechanisms include physical unclonable functions (PUF) and secret key generation (SKG) at the physical layer, as considered in this paper. In this framework, we propose (i) a zero round trip time (0-RTT) resumption authentication protocol combining PUF and SKG processes, (ii) a novel authenticated encryption (AE) using SKG, and (iii) pipelining of the AE SKG and the encrypted data transfer in order to reduce latency. Implementing the pipelining at PHY, we investigate a parallel SKG approach for multi-carrier systems, where a subset of the subcarriers are used for SKG and the rest for data transmission. The optimal solution to this PHY resource allocation problem is identified under security, power, and delay constraints, by formulating the subcarrier scheduling as a subset-sum 0−1 knapsack optimization. A heuristic algorithm of linear complexity is proposed and shown to incur negligible loss with respect to the optimal dynamic programming solution. All of the proposed mechanisms have the potential to pave the way for a new breed of latency aware security protocols

Securing Wireless Communications of the Internet of Things from the Physical Layer, An Overview

The security of the Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable interest as the low power constraints and complexity features of many IoT devices are limiting the use of conventional cryptographic techniques. This article provides an overview of recent research efforts on alternative approaches for securing IoT wireless communications at the physical layer, specifically the key topics of key generation and physical layer encryption. These schemes can be implemented and are lightweight, and thus offer practical solutions for providing effective IoT wireless security. Future research to make IoT-based physical layer security more robust and pervasive is also covered

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

A Novel Cross-Layer Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Things

An innovative cross-layer authentication protocol that integrates cryptography-based authentication and physical layer authentication (PLA) is proposed for massive cellular Internet of things (IoT) systems. Due to dramatic increases in the number of cellular IoT devices, a centralized authentication architecture in which a mobility management entity in core networks administers authentication of massive numbers of IoT devices may cause network congestion with large signaling overhead. Thus, a distributed authentication architecture in which a base station in radio access networks authenticates IoT devices locally is presented. In addition, a cross-layer authentication protocol is designed with a novel integration strategy under the distributed authentication architecture, where PLA, which employs physical features for authentication, is used as preemptive authentication in the proposed protocol. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations were performed to analyze the trade-off between authentication performance and overhead in the proposed authentication method compared with existing authentication protocols. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms conventional authentication and key agreement protocols in terms of overhead and computational complexity while guaranteeing low authentication error probability