Phase Jamming Attack: A Practical Attack on Physical layer-Based Key Derivation

Key derivation from the physical layer features of the communication channels is a promising security approach, which can help the key management and security improvement in communication networks. In this paper, we consider key generation techniques that quantize the received signal phase to obtain the secret keys. We then study the effect of a jamming attack on these techniques and evaluate the performance. We adopt two phase key derivation techniques, namely, one single-tone and two single-tone. Then we consider an active attacker that tries to make a disturbance in the key derivation procedure and changes the phase of received signal by transmitting an adversary signal. We evaluate the effect of jamming on the security performance of the system and show the ways to improve this performance. Our numerical results show that more quantization areas limit the probability of successful attacks.