Achieving Secure Communication Assisted by Physical Layer Encryption

Frequency hopping (FH) technique has been extensively used for high security communication because of its strong anti-jamming ability and good confidentiality. However, with the continuous advancement of electronic attacks, plenty of energy limited devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) are experiencing a sharp increase in interference, which poses serious challenges to the current FH sequence generation techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel FH sequence generation scheme by exploiting an ultra-lightweight block cipher (PRESENT), which strikes an effective balance between security and efficiency. Specifically, the values related to channel gain are mapped to corresponding FH codes through the output of lightweight block cipher algorithm. Moreover, the security of the proposed scheme has been analyzed. It turns out that the FH sequences generated by PRESENT algorithm outperform the FH sequences generated by a bit-slice lightweight block cipher suitable for multiple platforms (RECTANGLE) and a lightweight block cipher (LBlock) in terms of uniformity, randomness and complexity.