Physical Layer Security for Internet of Things: Authentication and Key Generation

Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive technology which has been fundamentally transforming our everyday life, including many exciting applications such as smart cities, smart home, connected healthcare, etc. However, this revolution will not be viable if we cannot provide a secure connection. The current communication networks are protected by conventional cryptography, which is based on complicated mathematical algorithms and/or protocols. However, the IoT consists of many low cost devices with limited computational capacity and battery powered, which cannot afford costly cryptography.

There is an emerging technology, namely physical layer security (PLS), which has demonstrated a great potential in protecting IoT, because it can achieve the security in a lightweight manner. PLS exploits the uncertainty and randomness from the physical world. In particular, radio frequency fingerprint identification extracts the hardware imperfection, originated from the manufacturing process, as the device fingerprint to authenticate the identity of the devices. In addition, the wireless channel between any two devices is unpredictable and dynamic, and its randomness can be exploited as the cryptographic keys to enable secure communications. This talk will introduce our recent work in these two areas.