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arXiv:1912.07331

Scalable Group Secret Key Generation over Wireless Channels

Ufuk Altun, Semiha Tedik Başaran, Güneş Karabulut Kurt, Enver Ozdemır

Published Dec 16, 2019• 0 citations
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Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation for multiple parties. Multi-user networks usually require a trusted party to efficiently distribute keys to the legitimate users and this process is a weakness against eavesdroppers. With the help of the physical layer security techniques, users can securely decide on a secret key without a trusted party by exploiting the unique properties of the channel. In this context, we develop a physical layer group key generation scheme that is also based on the ideas of the analog function computation studies. We firstly consider the key generation as a function to be computed over the wireless channel and propose two novel methods depending on the users transmission capability (i.e. half-duplex and full-duplex transmissions). Secondly, we exploit the uniqueness of the prime integers in order to enable the simultaneous transmission of the users for key generation. As a result, our approach contributes to the scalability of the existing physical layer key generation algorithms since all users transmit simultaneously rather than using pairwise communications. We prove that our half-duplex network model reduces the required number of communications for group key generation down to a linear scale. Furthermore, the full-duplex network model reduces to a constant scale.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1912.07331

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In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation for multiple parties. Multi-user networks usually require a trusted party to efficiently distribute keys to the legitimate users and this process is a weakness against eavesdroppers. With the help of the physical layer security techniques, users can securely decide on a secret key without a trusted party by exploiting the unique properties of the channel. In this context, we develop a physical layer group key generation scheme that is also based on the ideas of the analog function computation studies. We firstly consider the key generation as a function to be computed over the wireless channel and propose two novel methods depending on the users transmission capability (i.e. half-duplex and full-duplex transmissions). Secondly, we exploit the uniqueness of the prime integers in order to enable the simultaneous transmission of the users for key generation. As a result, our approach contributes to the scalability of the existing physical layer key generation algorithms since all users transmit simultaneously rather than using pairwise communications. We prove that our half-duplex network model reduces the required number of communications for group key generation down to a linear scale. Furthermore, the full-duplex network model reduces to a constant scale.
Encryption schemes for network security usually require a key distribution center to share or distribute the secret keys, which is difficult to deploy in wireless networks without fixed infrastructure. A novel key generation scheme based on the physical layer can generate a shared key between a pair of correlated parties by sharing random sources. The existing physical layer key generation scheme is based on the half-duplex mode with time division duplex (TDD) mode, which makes it impossible for the correlated communication parties to detect the channel simultaneously in order to improve the channel coherence. In this paper, we propose a full-duplex physical layer key generation scheme, which allows each legal communication nodes to transmit and receive signals at the same time, in order to reduce channel probing time and increase channel coherence performance. The simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme can much outperform some typical existing schemes in terms of the key performance evaluation indicators, key disagreement rate, key generation rate, entropy of the scheme improved, and the randomness of generated keys passed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) test.
Future sensor networks require energy and bandwidth efficient designs to support the growing number of nodes. The security aspect is often neglected due to the extra computational burden imposed on the sensor nodes. In this article, we propose a secret key generation method for wireless sensor networks by using the physical layer features. This key generation method is based on the superposition property of wireless channels. The proposed method exploits the multiple access property of the wireless channel with simultaneous transmissions as in theanalog function computationtechnique to solve the latency and scarce bandwidth problems of highly populated dense networks. All nodes use the same time and frequency block to provide scalability that islinearly proportionalto the number of nodes. The proposed method also benefits from the network density to provide security against eavesdroppers that aim to sniff the secret key from the channel. The security of the proposed method against eavesdroppers is analytically studied. Moreover, their application in multiple layers is investigated. The presented results have shown that there is a tradeoff between the total power consumption and total used bandwidth for secret key generation. Lastly, the error probability of the generated keys due to thermal noise and channel estimation error is investigated with computer simulations and compared with broadcasting-based benchmark model.
This chapter presents a multi-user secret key generation in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless networks. Physical-layer key generation (PKG) based on channel reciprocity has emerged as a new technique to establish secret keys between devices. However, in future wireless communications, massive antennas will be employed to support multiple users, which bring new challenges to PKG, e.g., low key agreements caused by long-time delay or strong inter-user interference. By harnessing the sparse characteristics of the beam domain channel model, we propose a general channel dimensionality reduction (CDR)-based secret key generation scheme and optimize the parameters of this scheme. The security of this key generation scheme under different user cases of non-overlapping and overlapping beams is then discussed. Some new directions that generalize and improve the basic scenarios for PKG are described. These new directions include multi-cell multi-user secret key generation, PKG in millimeter wave wireless communications, and PKG in frequency division duplexing systems.
With the increasing demands for sharing confidential information among massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 5G and beyond wireless networks, many applications require the common secret key generation for a group of IoT devices. However, most of the existing works on physical layer secret key generation (PLKG) only focus on the pairwise key generation between two users, which is a low efficient and high cost to be extended to the scenarios of group key generation. In this work, we propose a new efficient multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) physical layer group secret key generation scheme to reduce the consumption of channel probing and improve the efficiency for group key generation. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter randomly generates the group secret key and directly broadcasts the downlink data symbols to the group users. At the receiver end, each group user can efficiently “observe” the common group key through the downlink broadcasting data symbols, while keeping perfect secrecy of the shared group key against eavesdroppers. The performance of reliability, security, and the group key generation rate is fully investigated, which shows the advantages of high efficiency, low consumption, and strong robustness of the proposed scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
This paper by exploiting physical layer characteristics of wireless channel investigates group secret key generation problem for different types of wireless network.A new group key generation strategy with low complexity is proposed, which combines point to point pair-wise key generation technique, the multi-segment scheme and the onetime pad.This group key generation technique works for three types of communication networks: the three node network, the multi node ring and multi node mesh network.For these communication networks three group key generation algorithms are developed, the first two algorithms yield optimal group key rates while the third algorithm gives the optimal multiplexing gain.We address the time allocation problem in the channel estimation step to maximize the group key rate.A series of geometric programming, and a single condensation method based iterative algorithm is proposed in order to solve the non-convex max min problem.To validate the performance of the proposed key generation algorithm and the time allocation problem the numerical results are also been provided.
Recently, there has been great interest in physical layer security techniques that exploit the randomness of wireless channels for securely extracting cryptographic keys. Several interesting approaches have been developed and demonstrated for their feasibility. The state-of-the-art, however, still has much room for improving their practicality. This is because i) the key bit generation rate supported by most existing approaches is very low which significantly limits their practical usage given the intermittent connectivity in mobile environments; ii) existing approaches suffer from the scalability and flexibility issues, i.e., they cannot be directly extended to support efficient group key generation and do not suit for static environments. With these observations in mind, we present a new secret key generation approach that utilizes the uniformly distributed phase information of channel responses to extract shared cryptographic keys under narrowband multipath fading models. The proposed approach enjoys a high key bit generation rate due to its efficient introduction of multiple randomized phase information within a single coherence time interval as the keying sources. The proposed approach also provides scalability and flexibility because it relies only on the transmission of periodical extensions of unmodulated sinusoidal beacons, which allows effective accumulation of channel phases across multiple nodes. The proposed scheme is thoroughly evaluated through both analytical and simulation studies. Compared to existing work that focus on pairwise key generation, our approach is highly scalable and can improve the analytical key bit generation rate by a couple of orders of magnitude.