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arXiv:1312.3304

The Effect of Eavesdropper's Statistics in Experimental Wireless Secret-Key Generation

Alexandre J. Pierrot, Rémi A. Chou, Matthieu R. Bloch

Published Dec 11, 2013• 13 citations
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Abstract

This paper investigates the role of the eavesdropper's statistics in the implementation of a practical secret-key generation system. We carefully conduct the information-theoretic analysis of a secret-key generation system from wireless channel gains measured with software-defined radios. In particular, we show that it is inaccurate to assume that the eavesdropper gets no information because of decorrelation with distance. We also provide a bound for the achievable secret-key rate in the finite key-length regime that takes into account the presence of correlated eavesdropper's observations. We evaluate this bound with our experimental gain measurements to show that operating with a finite number of samples incurs a loss in secret-key rate on the order of 20%.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1312.3304

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This paper investigates the role of the eavesdropper's statistics in the implementation of a practical secret-key generation system. We carefully conduct the information-theoretic analysis of a secret-key generation system from wireless channel gains measured with software-defined radios. In particular, we show that it is inaccurate to assume that the eavesdropper gets no information because of decorrelation with distance. We also provide a bound for the achievable secret-key rate in the finite key-length regime that takes into account the presence of correlated eavesdropper's observations. We evaluate this bound with our experimental gain measurements to show that operating with a finite number of samples incurs a loss in secret-key rate on the order of 20%.
This letter investigates the secret key capacity of key generation from correlated wireless channels in a source model. We systematically study a practical scenario by taking into account all relevant parameters including sampling delay, eavesdroppers' location, qualities of legitimate and eavesdropping channels, Doppler spread, and pilot length. Our findings indicate that secret key capacity is determined by the cross correlation of the channel measurements, and a better legitimate channel is not necessary when the correlation between legitimate channels is higher than correlation between legitimate and eavesdropping channels. We also find that it is possible to tune the secret key capacity by carefully designing the sampling delay, pilot length, and channel qualities. This letter offers practical design guidelines on secure key generation systems.
This paper proposes a proof-of-principle design of a secret key generation system along with the desirable secrecy analysis to guarantee information-theoretic security. We conduct physical experiments on programmable radios in an indoor environment to analyze the statistical characteristics of the induced source that we employ to generate secret keys. We also provide a generic security analysis of the system, and we give an estimate of the achievable secret key rates for a target information leakage in the finite block-length regime.
Extracting information-theoretically secret keys from random fluctuations of wireless channels is a promising technology for protecting data in future radio systems like IoT, SCADA and 5G. However, the presence of Line-of-Sight (LoS) component can drastically degrade the key rate between legitimate parties. Moreover, knowledge of antenna location brings additional information to eavesdroppers about the radio channel. In the following paper we quantify this information and try to evaluate how it affects secret key capacity. Finally, we postulate randomizing the LOS channel, which will increase eavesdropper's equivocation.
We study the problem of secret-key generation in a wireless environment by exploiting the inherent randomness and reciprocity of the channel gain. A channel model is proposed which takes into account the effect of reflections (or re-radiations) from receive antenna elements, thus capturing a physical property of practical antennas. It turns out that the reflections have a deteriorating effect on the achievable secret-key rate at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). These insights provide guidelines in the design and operation of communication systems using the properties of the wireless channel to prevent eavesdropping.
Secret-key generation in a wireless environment exploiting the randomness and reciprocity of the channel gains is considered. A new channel model is proposed which takes into account the effect of reflections (or re-radiations) from receive antenna elements, thus capturing an physical property of practical antennas. It turns out that the reflections have a deteriorating effect on the achievable secret-key rate between the legitimate nodes at high signal-to-noise-power-ratio (SNR). The insights provide guidelines in the design and operation of communication systems using the properties of the wireless channel to prevent eavesdropping.
Two legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, wish to generate secret keys from the wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper, referred to as Eve, in order to use such keys for encryption and decryption. In general, the secret key rate highly depends on the coherence time of the channel. In particular, a straightforward method of generating secret keys in static environments results in ultra-low rates. In order to resolve this problem, we introduce a low-complexity method called induced randomness. In this method, Alice and Bob independently generate local randomness to be used together with the uniqueness of the wireless channel coefficients in order to enable high-rate secret key generation. In this work, two scenarios are considered: first, when Alice and Bob share a direct communication channel, and second, when Alice and Bob do not have a direct link and communicate through an untrusted relay. After exchanging the induced randomness, post-processing is done by Alice and Bob to generate highly-correlated samples that are used for the key generation. Such samples are then converted into bits, disparities between the sequences generated by Alice and Bob are mitigated, and the resulting sequences are then hashed to compensate for the information leakage to the eavesdropper and to allow consistency checking of the generated key bit sequences. We utilize semantic security measures and information-theoretic inequalities to upper bound the probability of successful eavesdropping attack in terms of the mutual information measures that can be numerically computed. Given certain reasonable system parameters this bound is numerically evaluated to be 2-31and 2-10.57in the first and the second scenario, respectively.