LQI-Key: Symmetric Key Generation Scheme for Internet-of-Things (IoT) Devices Using Wireless Channel Link Quality

Abstract

One of the important part of IoT ecosystem is wearable device technology, that has many applications in day to day life. Due to resource constraints, complex security protocols are not feasible for tiny wearable devices. Hence, alternative approaches employing wireless channel characteristics have been proposed by many researchers. In this work, we propose a novel symmetric key generation scheme for wearable IoT devices that exploits the unique features of wireless channel link quality indicator (LQI), compared to other parameter e.g., received signal strength (RSS) used in prior work. We select LQI as a parameter of interest since it is the measure of the channel link quality connecting two communicating parties, whereas RSS is the total energy measured by radio including noise. We implement our solution on of f-the-shelf IoT devices and demonstrate experimentally that our scheme is lightweight and suitable for practical applications.