Efficient High-Rate Secret Key Extraction in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Collaboration

Secret key establishment is a fundamental requirement for private communication between two entities. In this article, we propose and evaluate a new approach for secret key extraction where multiple sensors collaborate in exchanging probe packets and collecting channel measurements. Essentially, measurements from multiple channels have a substantially higher differential entropy compared to the measurements from a single channel, thereby resulting in more randomness in the information source for key extraction, and this in turn produces stronger secret keys. We also explore the fundamental trade-off between the quadratic increase in the number of measurements of the channels due to multiple nodes per group versus a linear reduction in the sampling rate and a linear increase in the time gap between bidirectional measurements. To experimentally evaluate collaborative secret key extraction in wireless sensor networks, we first build a simple yet flexible testbed with multiple TelosB sensor nodes. Next, we perform large-scale experiments with different configurations of collaboration. Our experiments show that in comparison to the 1 × 1 configuration, collaboration among sensor nodes significantly increases the secret bit extraction per second, per probe, as well as per millijoule of transmission energy. In addition, we show that the collaborating nodes can improve the performance further when they exploit both space and frequency diversities.