KaFHCa: Key-establishment via Frequency Hopping Collisions

TL;DR

KaFHCa is a crypto-less key establishment protocol for IoT devices that uses frequency hopping collisions and fading phenomena to generate shared secrets securely, regardless of channel conditions or adversary position.

Contribution

It introduces KaFHCa, a novel frequency hopping-based key generation method that is independent of radio channel conditions and provides source indistinguishability for enhanced security.

Findings

Generates 128-bit keys with fewer than 564 transmissions.

Works effectively under channel fading with {4} = 8dB.

Independent of adversary position and channel status.

Abstract

The massive deployment of IoT devices being utilized by home automation, industrial and military scenarios demands for high security and privacy standards to be achieved through innovative solutions. This paper proposes KaFHCa, a crypto-less protocol that generates shared secret keys by combining random frequency hopping collisions and source indistinguishability independently of the radio channel status. While other solutions tie the secret bit rate generation to the current radio channel conditions, thus becoming unpractical in static environments, KaFHCa guarantees almost the same secret bitrate independently of the channel conditions. KaFHCa generates shared secrets through random collisions of the transmitter and the receiver in the radio spectrum, and leverages on the fading phenomena to achieve source indistinguishability, thus preventing unauthorized eavesdroppers from inferring the key. The proposed solution is (almost) independent of the adversary position, works under the conservative assumption of channel fading ({\sigma} = 8dB), and is capable of generating a secret key of 128 bits with less than 564 transmissions.