Enhanced Message Authentication Encryption Scheme Based on Physical-Layer Key Generation in Resource-Limited Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is facing growing security challenges due to its vulnerability. It is imperative to address the security issues using lightweight and efficient encryption schemes in resource-limited IoT. In this paper, we propose an enhanced message authentication encryption (MAE) scheme based on physical-layer key generation (PKG), which uses the random nature of wireless channels to generate and negotiate keys, and simultaneously encrypts the messages and authenticates the source. The proposed enhanced MAE scheme can greatly improve the security performance via dynamic keyed primitives construction while consuming very few resources. The enhanced MAE scheme is an efficient and lightweight secure communication solution, which is very suitable for resource-limited IoT. Theoretical analysis and simulations are carried out to confirm the security of the enhanced MAE scheme and evaluate its performance. A one-bit flipping in the session key or plain texts will result in a 50%-bit change in the ciphertext or message authentication code. The numerical results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed scheme in terms of diffusion and confusion. With respect to the typical advanced encryption standard (AES)based scheme, the performance of the proposed scheme improves by 80.5% in terms of algorithm execution efficiency.