Cross-Layer AKA Protocol for Industrial Control Based on Channel State Information

Yanru Chen, Fengming Yin, Bing Guo, Zhiwen Pan, Liangyin Chen

Abstract: Industrial control technology faces serious communication security threats. Authenticated key agreement(AKA) protocols are essential to secure communication between industrial control nodes, but they must be efficient and robust due to resource constraints. Existing AKA protocols based on encryption algorithms have limitations such as vulnerability to clone attacks. Also, there is a lack of protocol’s research that fully integrate advantages of physical and upper layer. We propose a novel cross-layer AKA protocol that leverages channel state information(CSI), which has uniqueness and real randomness, and is unforgeable, to enhance security and reduce computational overhead. Our protocol only requires simple operations such as algebraic, Hash and XOR. We introduce a new security verification model, superCK, which extends the well-known eCK and relaxes assumptions on attackers. Our protocol achieves 12 fully provable key security capabilities, and has 75.91% less computational overhead and 6.99% less communication overhead than the best ones, achieving an optimal trade-off between security and efficiency.