A Cross-Layer Key Establishment Model for Wireless Devices in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Wireless communications in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are vulnerable to many adversarial attacks such as eavesdropping. To secure the communications, secret session keys need to be established between wireless devices. In existing symmetric key establishment protocols, it is assumed that devices are pre-loaded with secrets. In the CPS, however, wireless devices are produced by different companies. It is not practical to assume that the devices are pre-loaded with certain secrets when they leave companies. As a consequence, existing symmetric key establishment protocols cannot be directly implemented in the CPS. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents a cross-layer key establishment model for heterogeneous wireless devices in the CPS. Specifically, by implementing our model, wireless devices extract master keys (shared with the system authority) at the physical layer using ambient wireless signals. Then, the system authority distributes secrets for devices (according to an existing symmetric key establishment protocol) by making use of the extracted master keys. Completing these operations, wireless devices can establish secret session keys at higher layers by calling the employed key establishment protocol. Additionally, we prove the security of the proposed model. We analyse the performance of the new model by implementing it and converting existing symmetric key establishment protocols into cross-layer key establishment protocols.