Prototyping a Generic Physical Layer Encryption Scheme for IoT Networks

To achieve information security objectives at the physical layer, while requiring a minimal resource footprint, Physical Layer Security (PLS) is a promising approach. In a previous work, the Grain-128PLE, a lightweight physical layer encryption (PLE) scheme derived from the Grain-128AEAD v2 stream cipher, was presented. The Grain-128PLE scheme is a generic PLE scheme that performs encryption and decryption at the physical layer, in between the channel coding and signal modulation processes. In this work, we focus on the implementation of the Grain-128PLE scheme and its performance evaluation with regards to the efficient use of resources during run-time. The evaluation results showed that the implemented PLE scheme incurs zero communication overhead and a small computational overhead that is dependent on the message length.