Wireless Transceiver Aided Run-Time Secret Key Extraction for IoT Device Security

This article provides a secret key extraction aided by wireless transceiver for Internet of Things (IoT) based consumer electronic (CE) devices, which can be a promising alternative to the conventional secret storage with non-volatile memory. Exploiting the wireless transceiver as a source of secret key generation, we propose a new type of static random access memory (SRAM) physically unclonable function (PUF), especially focusing on run-time extraction from most connected CE devices without additional hardware. The response of the proposed PUF is further processed by a fuzzy extractor to reproduce the secure key, where we suggest to use low-complexity convolutional code combined with interleaver for error correction. In addition, run-time multiple readout capability of our wireless transceiver aided PUF enables to provide a helper data-less key reproduction scheme to reduce leaked information and implementation complexity. Experimental results on two platforms equipped with the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi and IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Network (SUN) based wireless transceivers confirm that the proposed PUF and key reproduction schemes successfully generate the secret key at any time, which makes our approach easily applicable to various IoT based CE devices with security requirements.