KEHKey: Kinetic Energy Harvester-based Authentication and Key Generation for Body Area Network

For kinetic-powered body area networks, we explore the feasibility of converting energy harvesting patterns for device authentication and symmetric secret keys generation continuously. The intuition is that at any given time, multiple wearable devices harvest kinetic energy from the same user activity, such as walking, which allows them to independently observe a common secret energy harvesting pattern not accessible to outside devices. Such continuous KEH-based authentication and key generation is expected to be highly power efficient as it obviates the need to employ any extra sensors, such as accelerometer, to precisely track the walking patterns. Unfortunately, lack of precise activity tracking introduces bit mismatches between the independently generated keys, which makes KEH-based authentication and symmetric key generation a challenging problem. We propose KEHKey, a KEH-based authentication and key generation system that employs a compressive sensing-based information reconciliation protocol for wearable devices to effectively correct any mismatches in generated keys. We implement KEHKey using off-the-shelf piezoelectric energy harvesting products and evaluate its performance with data collected from 24 subjects wearing the devices on different body locations including head, torso and hands. Our results show that KEHKey is able to generate the same key for two KEH-embedded devices at a speed of 12.57 bps while reducing energy consumption by 59% compared to accelerometer-based methods, which makes it suitable for continuous operation. Finally, we demonstrate that KEHKey can successfully defend against typical adversarial attacks. In particular, KEHKey is found to be more resilient to video side channel attacks than its accelerometer-based counterparts.