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To generate symmetric keys, we take advantage of photovoltage measurements generated from solar cells equipped with a pair of IoT devices. Symmetric keys are essential for pairing IoT devices and further securing wireless communication. Despite the sensitivity to varying lighting conditions, challenges still remain for the use of solar cells for key generation, such as time unsynchronisation and noisy measurements. To solve these challenges, we design a novel key generation framework, SolarKey, which includes the starting point detection and a compressed sensing-based two-tier key reconciliation method. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed key generation method in various environments, which shows the proposed method can improve the key matching rate by up to 25%. We also conduct security analysis and the randomness test, which shows that SolarKey is resilient to common attacks such as the eavesdropping attack and the imitating attack and sufficiently random.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3605780","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,29]],"date-time":"2023-06-29T11:36:41Z","timestamp":1688038601000},"page":"1-24","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["SolarKey: Battery-free Key Generation Using Solar Cells"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"20","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0781-9655","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bo","family":"Wei","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Newcastle University, United Kingdom"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9741-5912","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Weitao","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"City University of Hong Kong SAR, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0000-2566-9251","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mingcen","family":"Gao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2190-9937","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Guohao","family":"Lan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0517-2392","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kai","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"CISTER Research Centre, Portugal"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0293-0781","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chengwen","family":"Luo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shenzhen University, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9001-1931","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jin","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shenzhen University, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,10,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","unstructured":"(n.d.). 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