RSS-based Secret Key Establishment using Middle-Point Quantization and Clover Filter Algorithm

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes popular technology. The one aspect that makes important concern in IoT is the confidentiality of communications. For securing communication in IoT, cryptography algorithm such as symmetrical cryptography requires the secret key exchange process in a public wireless network to ensure the sameness of the secret key. However, the exchange of secret keys in the public wireless network can be exploited by adversaries. So, we present the secret key generation scheme that generates a shared random key through observation of the communication channel parameter i.e. Receive Signal Strength (RSS) between two devices that no need to exchange the secret key. We use Middle-Point quantization to convert the RSS into bit sequences and use Clover Filter to eliminate the error bits after the quantization process. Measurement results showed that the proposed scheme improves the performance of existing schemes if the interval used is 25. The proposed scheme improves the KGR 24 times and improves efficiency to 63%. While for KDR, the proposed scheme can decrease the KDR value of 67.9%. Also, in all scenarios, the proposed scheme can pass the NIST randomness test.