A novel physical layer secret key generation method for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are indispensable across various applications, from environmental surveillance to indus-trial automation, owing to their ability to collect and transmit data autonomously. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless systems, these systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. Recently, channel-based secret key generation methods have been widely used in the literature. In these methods, Alice and Bob generate random signals and share these signals with each other. Then, using the secret key paired multiplication with the channel between them, a secret key is shared between legitimate users, while illegitimate nodes cannot access the key. However, these methods consider only two users. This paper proposes a novel method for multiple users. Extensive simulation proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. However, when the number of users increases, the performance of the proposed method decreases.