A New Frontier For Internet of Things Security: Far-Flung Key Generation

物联网安全的新领域：远距离密钥生成

• 批准号: EP/V027697/1
• 负责人: Junqing Zhang
• 金额: $ 31.99万
• 依托单位: University of Liverpool
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FV027697%2F1
• 关键词: New; Frontier; Internet; Things; Security

The Internet of Things (IoT) has digitally transformed our everyday life with exciting applications such as smart home, connected healthcare, smart cities, manufacturing automation, relying on billions of devices that have become connected over the past decade. Ofcom estimated that the number of IoT devices in the UK will soar from 13 million in 2016 to 156 million in 2024. Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) are new IoT systems with features of low power and wide coverage (over several kilometres). LPWAN accounts one-fourth of the number of IoT devices and the market. Digital Catapult is building the national LPWAN to improve the qualities of our lives and boost the UK economy using LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and SigFox technologies. Vodafone and Three UK are piloting NB-IoT for a nationwide cellular-based LPWAN.However, this digital revolution can only be viable if we can provide secure wireless connections. A pair of keys should be established between legitimate devices for encryption and decryption prior to transmissions. Although conventional key distribution schemes, e.g., elliptic curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) algorithm, are quite mature, they tend to be less suitable for lightweight IoT applications owing to their high complexity. In practice, the pre-shared key (PSK) is often used, which may never refresh the key after its initial configuration. This obviously presents security risks since the key can be revealed, e.g. by side channel attacks. What is worse, many users lack awareness. The UK's first cyber survey in 2019 by the National Cyber Security Centre revealed numerous weak passwords, e.g., 23.2 million victims worldwide used 123456 as their passwords. The vulnerabilities of IoT have resulted in numerous grave security attacks, which have compromised user privacy, adversely affected the economy and undermined the trust in the society. Gartner reported the information security market exceeded $124 billion in 2019.Indeed, conceiving secure yet low-complexity key distribution for low-cost IoT devices is challenging. It becomes even more difficult and cumbersome if key refreshing is needed, such as in LPWAN where IoT devices are located in a far-flung environment over several kilometres radius and may not be attended. This open challenge can be tackled with a radical and completely different approach, namely key generation from wireless channels, which automatically generates cryptographic keys from unpredictable characteristics of the wireless channel, and thus avoids the conventional key distribution. While key generation has been demonstrated to work well with short-range communications such as WiFi, its exploration with LPWAN technologies such as LoRa and NB-IoT is rather limited, due to the more complicated radio propagation conditions and the affected channel reciprocity. This project hence will bridge this gap by designing scalable, automatic, and lightweight key generation solutions for LPWAN.This project will be the first systematic study for LPWAN-based key generation. A synergistic approach will be adopted which involves theoretical modelling, algorithm design and experimental validation. The core aspects of this project will include novel mathematical channel correlation models and channel decomposition algorithms as well as new key generation protocols tuned and optimised for LPWAN. Extensive field-measurements will be carried out to evaluate our algorithms. A unique feature of this project will be the creation of viable security solutions for IoT validated by extensive measurements and proof-of-concept prototypes.

物联网(IoT)依靠过去十年连接的数十亿设备，通过智能家居、互联医疗、智能城市、制造自动化等令人兴奋的应用，数字化地改变了我们的日常生活。英国通信办公室估计，英国物联网设备的数量将从2016年的1300万台飙升至2024年的1.56亿台。低功耗广域网(LPWAN)是一种新型的物联网系统，具有低功耗、覆盖范围广(超过几公里)的特点。LPWAN占物联网设备数量和市场的四分之一。Digital Catapult正在建设国家LPWAN，以提高我们的生活质量，并使用LoRaWAN、NB-IoT和SIGFOX技术提振英国经济。沃达丰和三家英国公司正在为全国性的基于蜂窝的LPWAN试验NB-IoT。然而，只有在我们能够提供安全的无线连接的情况下，这场数字革命才能可行。在传输之前，应在合法设备之间建立一对用于加密和解密的密钥。虽然传统的密钥分发方案，如椭圆曲线Diffie Hellman(ECDH)算法已经相当成熟，但由于其高度的复杂性，它们往往不太适合轻量级的物联网应用。在实践中，经常使用预共享密钥(PSK)，在其初始配置之后可能永远不会刷新密钥。这显然存在安全风险，因为密钥可能被泄露，例如通过旁路攻击。更糟糕的是，许多用户缺乏意识。英国国家网络安全中心于2019年进行的第一次网络调查揭示了大量薄弱的密码，例如，全球2320万受害者使用123456作为他们的密码。物联网的漏洞导致了无数严重的安全攻击，损害了用户隐私，对经济造成了不利影响，破坏了社会信任。Gartner报告称，信息安全市场在2019年超过1240亿美元。事实上，为低成本物联网设备设想安全但低复杂性的密钥分发是具有挑战性的。如果需要密钥更新，例如在LPWAN中，物联网设备位于半径数公里且可能无人值守的偏远环境中，则会变得更加困难和繁琐。这一开放挑战可以通过一种彻底且完全不同的方法来解决，即从无线信道生成密钥，该方法根据无线信道的不可预测的特性自动生成加密密钥，从而避免了传统的密钥分发。虽然密钥生成已被证明与WiFi等短距离通信一起工作得很好，但由于更复杂的无线电传播条件和受影响的信道互易性，它对LPWAN技术(如LORA和NB-IoT)的探索相当有限。因此，该项目将通过为LPWAN设计可扩展、自动和轻量级的密钥生成解决方案来弥合这一差距。该项目将是基于LPWAN的密钥生成的第一个系统研究。将采用协同方法，包括理论建模、算法设计和实验验证。该项目的核心方面将包括新的数学信道相关模型和信道分解算法，以及针对LPWAN调整和优化的新的密钥生成协议。我们将进行广泛的实地测量来评估我们的算法。该项目的一个独特功能将是为物联网创建可行的安全解决方案，并通过广泛的测量和概念验证原型进行验证。

项目成果

Joint Precoding and Phase Shift Design in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-Assisted Secret Key Generation

• DOI: 10.1109/tifs.2023.3268881
• 发表时间: 2022-07
• 期刊: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
• 影响因子: 6.8
• 作者: Tianyu Lu;Liquan Chen;Junqing Zhang;Chen Chen-Chen;A. Hu

Towards Receiver-Agnostic and Collaborative Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification

• DOI: 10.1109/tmc.2023.3340039
• 发表时间: 2024-07-01
• 期刊: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING
• 影响因子: 7.9
• 作者: Shen，Guanxiong;Zhang，Junqing;Chen，Liquan
• 通讯作者: Chen，Liquan

White-Box Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning-Based Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification

• DOI: 10.1109/icc45041.2023.10278927
• 发表时间: 2023-05
• 期刊: ICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications
• 作者: Jie Ma;Junqing Zhang;Guanxiong Shen;A. Marshall;Chip-Hong Chang

Toward Length-Versatile and Noise-Robust Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification

• DOI: 10.1109/tifs.2023.3266626
• 发表时间: 2022-07
• 期刊: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
• 影响因子: 6.8
• 作者: Guanxiong Shen;Junqing Zhang;A. Marshall;M. Valkama;J. Cavallaro

Secret Key Generation for IRS-Assisted Multi-Antenna Systems: A Machine Learning-Based Approach

• DOI: 10.1109/tifs.2023.3331588
• 发表时间: 2023-04
• 期刊: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
• 影响因子: 6.8
• 作者: Chen Chen-Chen;Junqing Zhang;Tianyu Lu;M. Sandell;Liquan Chen