Dynamic Bayesian Network Based Security Analysis for Physical Layer Key Extraction

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned to expand Internet connectivity of the physical world, and the mobile edge cloud can be leveraged to enhance the resource-constrained IoT devices. The performance of the cloud-enhanced IoT applications depends on various system-wide information, such as the wireless channel states between IoT devices and their corresponding serving edge cloud nodes. However, with the semi-trusted edge resources and the public nature of wireless channels, public sharing of system information should be avoided to better balance the tradeoff between performance and security. In this paper, the benefits of local information exchange is investigated, where the privately-owned physical layer channel information is leveraged to extract lightweight keys. For the point-to-point wireless communications links with multiple passive eavesdroppers, the security metric in terms of conditional min-entropy is evaluated via the proposed Dynamic Bayesian Model. The proposed model can flexibly incorporate various dynamic information flows in the system and quantify the information leakage caused by wireless broadcasting. The rigorously defined and derived security metrics for such a key generation pipeline has been verified via the real-world collected time-varying wireless channel data. The designed model can achieve previously inconceivable security properties.