Key Generation for Internet of Things: A Contemporary Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent key generation methods for IoT devices, categorizing approaches, comparing their effectiveness, analyzing security issues, and highlighting future research challenges in establishing secure IoT communications.

Contribution

It introduces a new taxonomy for classifying IoT key generation schemes and provides comprehensive comparative analysis and security discussion.

Findings

Various key generation protocols have different security vulnerabilities.

Existing approaches vary significantly in efficiency and security.

Future research should address identified security challenges.

Abstract

Key generation is a promising technique to bootstrap secure communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have no prior knowledge between each other. In the past few years, a variety of key generation protocols and systems have been proposed. In this survey, we review and categorise recent key generation systems based on a novel taxonomy. Then, we provide both quantitative and qualitative comparisons of existing approaches. We also discuss the security vulnerabilities of key generation schemes and possible countermeasures. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and point out several potential research directions.