Mobility Assisted Secret Key Generation Using Wireless Link Signatures

Abstract

We propose an approach where wireless devices, interested in establishing a secret key, sample the channel impulse response (CIR) space in a physical area to collect and combine uncorrelated CIR measurements to generate the secret key. We study the impact of mobility patterns in obtaining uncorrelated measurements. Using extensive measurements in both indoor and outdoor settings, we find that (i) when movement step size is larger than one foot the measured CIRs are mostly uncorrelated, and (ii) more diffusion in the mobility results in less correlation in the measured CIRs. We develop efficient mechanisms to encode CIRs and reconcile the differences in the bits extracted between the two devices. Our results show that our scheme generates very high entropy secret bits and that too at a high bit rate. The secret bits, that we generate using our approach, also pass the 8 randomness tests of the NIST test suite.