KGPT: Wireless Key Generation Based on Power Tuning for Static Internet-of-Things

Wireless key generation is an emerging key
sharing solution for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which
heavily relies on wireless signal fluctuations. However,
most IoT devices have remained static ever since being
deployed, where their stable wireless signals seriously de-
teriorate the effectiveness of key generation. In this article,
we proposea new wireless Key Generation approach based
on Power Tuning (KGPT) for statice IoT. Unlike the existing
methods, KGPT does not require any additional helpers or
any hardware modifications, thus, suiting practical static
IoT deployments. We analyze the possibility of eavesdrop-
ping on the existing wireless key generation. We propose
three power tuning strategies to generate wireless signal
fluctuations for key generation in static IoT while defending
against eavesdropping. In a static IoT scenario, we conduct
experimental evaluations to first verify the eavesdropping
on multi-antenna wireless key generation and then demon-
strate the effectiveness of the proposed KGPT in producing
sufficient signal fluctuations for key generation. Results
show that KGPT can achieve a correlation value up to 0.97
for legitimate links while resisting the correlation of eaves-
dropping links down below 0.4.