Energy Harvesting in Secret Key Generation Systems under Jamming Attacks

Secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness at two remote locations has been shown to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks in the form of jamming. Typically, such attacks are alleviated with frequency hopping/spreading techniques that rely on expansion of the system bandwidth. In the present study, energy harvesting (EH) is exploited as a novel counter-jamming approach that alleviates the need for extra bandwidth resources. Assuming the legitimate users have EH capabilities, the idea is that part of the jamming signal can potentially be harvested and converted into useful communication power. In this framework, the competitive interaction between a pair of legitimate users and a jammer is formulated as a zero-sum game. A critical transmission power for the legitimate users is identified which allows to completely characterize the unique NE of the game in closed form. Remarkably, this threshold also provides the option to effectively neutralize the jammer, i.e., prevent the jammer from carrying out the attack altogether. Through numerical evaluations, EH is shown to be a counter-jamming approach that can offer substantial gains in terms of relative SKG rates

Energy Harvesting in Secret Key Generation Systems under Jamming Attacks

Secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness at two remote locations has been shown to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks in the form of jamming. Typically, such attacks are alleviated with frequency hopping/spreading techniques that rely on expansion of the system bandwidth. In the present study, energy harvesting (EH) is exploited as a novel counter-jamming approach that alleviates the need for extra bandwidth resources. Assuming the legitimate users have EH capabilities, the idea is that part of the jamming signal can potentially be harvested and converted into useful communication power. In this framework, the competitive interaction between a pair of legitimate users and a jammer is formulated as a zero-sum game. A critical transmission power for the legitimate users is identified which allows to completely characterize the unique NE of the game in closed form. Remarkably, this threshold also provides the option to effectively neutralize the jammer, i.e., prevent the jammer from carrying out the attack altogether. Through numerical evaluations, EH is shown to be a counter-jamming approach that can offer substantial gains in terms of relative SKG rates

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

Protecting Secret Key Generation Systems Against Jamming: Energy Harvesting and Channel Hopping Approaches

Jamming attacks represent a critical vulnerability for wireless secret key generation (SKG) systems. In this paper, two counter-jamming approaches are investigated for SKG systems: first, the employment of energy harvesting (EH) at the legitimate nodes to turn part of the jamming power into useful communication power, and, second, the use of channel hopping or power spreading in block fading channels to reduce the impact of jamming. In both cases, the adversarial interaction between the pair of legitimate nodes and the jammer is formulated as a two-player zero-sum game and the Nash and Stackelberg equilibria are characterized analytically and in closed form. In particular, in the case of EH receivers, the existence of a critical transmission power for the legitimate nodes allows the full characterization of the game's equilibria and also enables the complete neutralization of the jammer. In the case of channel hopping versus power spreading techniques, it is shown that the jammer's optimal strategy is always power spreading while the legitimate nodes should only use power spreading in the high signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) regime. In the low SIR regime, when avoiding the jammer's interference becomes critical, channel hopping is optimal for the legitimate nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of both counter-jamming measures

Protecting Secret Key Generation Systems Against Jamming: Energy Harvesting and Channel Hopping Approaches

Jamming attacks represent a critical vulnerability for wireless secret key generation (SKG) systems. In this paper, two counter-jamming approaches are investigated for SKG systems: first, the employment of energy harvesting (EH) at the legitimate nodes to turn part of the jamming power into useful communication power, and, second, the use of channel hopping or power spreading in block fading channels to reduce the impact of jamming. In both cases, the adversarial interaction between the pair of legitimate nodes and the jammer is formulated as a two-player zero-sum game and the Nash and Stackelberg equilibria are characterized analytically and in closed form. In particular, in the case of EH receivers, the existence of a critical transmission power for the legitimate nodes allows the full characterization of the game's equilibria and also enables the complete neutralization of the jammer. In the case of channel hopping versus power spreading techniques, it is shown that the jammer's optimal strategy is always power spreading while the legitimate nodes should only use power spreading in the high signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) regime. In the low SIR regime, when avoiding the jammer's interference becomes critical, channel hopping is optimal for the legitimate nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of both counter-jamming measures

H2B: Heartbeat-based Secret Key Generation Using Piezo Vibration Sensors

We present Heartbeats-2-Bits (H2B), which is a system for securely pairing wearable devices by generating a shared secret key from the skin vibrations caused by heartbeat. This work is motivated by potential power saving opportunity arising from the fact that heartbeat intervals can be detected energy-efficiently using inexpensive and power-efficient piezo sensors, which obviates the need to employ complex heartbeat monitors such as Electrocardiogram or Photoplethysmogram. Indeed, our experiments show that piezo sensors can measure heartbeat intervals on many different body locations including chest, wrist, waist, neck and ankle. Unfortunately, we also discover that the heartbeat interval signal captured by piezo vibration sensors has low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) because they are not designed as precision heartbeat monitors, which becomes the key challenge for H2B. To overcome this problem, we first apply a quantile function-based quantization method to fully extract the useful entropy from the noisy piezo measurements. We then propose a novel Compressive Sensing-based reconciliation method to correct the high bit mismatch rates between the two independently generated keys caused by low SNR. We prototype H2B using off-the-shelf piezo sensors and evaluate its performance on a dataset collected from different body positions of 23 participants. Our results show that H2B has an overwhelming pairing success rate of 95.6%. We also analyze and demonstrate H2B's robustness against three types of attacks. Finally, our power measurements show that H2B is very power-efficient

Security for 5G Mobile Wireless Networks

The advanced features of 5G mobile wireless network systems yield new security requirements and challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on security of 5G wireless network systems compared to the traditional cellular networks. The paper starts with a review on 5G wireless networks particularities as well as on the new requirements and motivations of 5G wireless security. The potential attacks and security services with the consideration of new service requirements and new use cases in 5G wireless networks are then summarized. The recent development and the existing schemes for the 5G wireless security are presented based on the corresponding security services including authentication, availability, data confidentiality, key management and privacy. The paper further discusses the new security features involving different technologies applied to 5G such as heterogeneous networks, device-to-device communications, massive multiple-input multiple-output, software defined networks and Internet of Things. Motivated by these security research and development activities, we propose a new 5G wireless security architecture, based on which the analysis of identity management and flexible authentication is provided. As a case study, we explore a handover procedure as well as a signaling load scheme to show the advantage of the proposed security architecture. The challenges and future directions of 5G wireless security are finally summarized

Energy harvesting towards self-powered iot devices

The internet of things (IoT) manages a large infrastructure of web-enabled smart devices, small devices that use embedded systems, such as processors, sensors, and communication hardware to collect, send, and elaborate on data acquired from their environment. Thus, from a practical point of view, such devices are composed of power-efficient storage, scalable, and lightweight nodes needing power and batteries to operate. From the above reason, it appears clear that energy harvesting plays an important role in increasing the efficiency and lifetime of IoT devices. Moreover, from acquiring energy by the surrounding operational environment, energy harvesting is important to make the IoT device network more sustainable from the environmental point of view. Different state-of-the-art energy harvesters based on mechanical, aeroelastic, wind, solar, radiofrequency, and pyroelectric mechanisms are discussed in this review article. To reduce the power consumption of the batteries, a vital role is played by power management integrated circuits (PMICs), which help to enhance the system's life span. Moreover, PMICs from different manufacturers that provide power management to IoT devices have been discussed in this paper. Furthermore, the energy harvesting networks can expose themselves to prominent security issues putting the secrecy of the system to risk. These possible attacks are also discussed in this review article