Cooperative Key Generation for Data Dissemination in Cyber-Physical Systems

Securing wireless communication is significant for privacy and confidentiality of sensing data in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). However, due to broadcast nature of radio channels, disseminating sensory data is vulnerable to eavesdropping and message modification. Generating secret keys by extracting the shared randomness in a wireless fading channel is a promising way to improve the communication security. In this poster, we present a novel secret key generation protocol for securing real-time data dissemination in CPS, where the sensor nodes cooperatively generate a shared key by estimating the quantized fading channel randomness. A 2-hop wireless sensor network testbed is built and preliminary experimental results show that the quantization intervals and distance between the nodes lead to a secret bit mismatch.