Efficient and Consistent Key Extraction Based on Received Signal Strength for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Various advanced 5G techniques are bringing us even closer to the era of smart vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), among which enabling secure communication for any vehicle pair is a necessary prerequisite. However, due to the unique features of fast moving and high dynamics in VANETs, the time for key establishment between a vehicle pair is rather limited. Consequently, traditional shared or public key-based mechanisms, which rely heavily on underlying infrastructure and are usually time-consuming, cannot be adopted for key establishment between vehicles. Toward this end, we propose in this paper an efficient physical layer key extraction method utilizing the received signal strength to generate secret keys, which is able to achieve high bit generation rate and 0-b disagreement, as corroborated by extensive experimental results.