Wireless Security for the Internet of Things: Device Authentication and Key Generation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive technology that has fundamentally transformed our everyday life, including many exciting applications such as smart cities, smart homes, 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 power, which cannot afford costly cryptography.

Physical layer security (PLS) has demonstrated great potential in protecting IoT, because it can achieve security in a lightweight manner. This talk will give a comprehensive introduction to our recent research on PLS for IoT. In the first part, we will present an emerging device authentication technique based on radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI). There are minute, unique, and stable hardware impairments originating from the manufacturing process, which can be extracted as device fingerprints to authenticate the identity of IoT devices. We will elaborate on how deep learning is leveraged to enhance RFFI performance. In the second part, we will introduce key generation from wireless channels. The channel characteristics are unpredictable and dynamic, and their randomness can be exploited as the cryptographic keys to enable secure communications. Our research findings on experimental evaluation with practical wireless standards including WiFi and LoRa will be presented.