Joint communication and sensing is expected to be one of the features introduced by the sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems. This will enable a huge variety of new applications, hence, it is important to find suitable approaches to secure the exchanged information. Conventional security mechanisms may not be able to meet the stringent delay, power, and complexity requirements which opens the challenge of finding new lightweight security solutions. A promising approach coming from the physical layer is the secret key generation (SKG) from channel fading. While SKG has been investigated for several decades, practical implementations of its full protocol are still scarce. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the SKG rates in real-life setups under a set of different scenarios. We consider a typical radar waveform and present a full implementation of the SKG protocol. Each step is evaluated to demonstrate that generating keys from the physical layer can be a viable solution for future networks. However, we show that there is not a single solution that can be generalized for all cases, instead, parameters should be chosen according to the context.
Joint communication and sensing is expected to be one of the features introduced by the sixth-generation (6G) wireless systems. This will enable a huge variety of new applications, hence, it is important to find suitable approaches to secure the exchanged information. Conventional security mechanisms may not be able to meet the stringent delay, power, and complexity requirements which opens the challenge of finding new lightweight security solutions. A promising approach coming from the physical layer is the secret key generation (SKG) from channel fading. While SKG has been investigated for several decades, practical implementations of its full protocol are still scarce. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the SKG rates in real-life setups under a set of different scenarios. We consider a typical radar waveform and present a full implementation of the SKG protocol. Each step is evaluated to demonstrate that generating keys from the physical layer can be a viable solution for future networks. However, we show that there is not a single solution that can be generalized for all cases, instead, parameters should be chosen according to the context.
Physical layer security (PLS) is seen as the means to enhance physical layer trustworthiness in 6G. This work provides a proof-of-concept for one of the most mature PLS technologies, i.e., secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients during the channel’s coherence time. As opposed to other works, where only specific parts of the protocol are typically investigated, here, we implement the full SKG chain in four indoor experimental campaigns. In detail, we consider two legitimate nodes, who use the wireless channel to extract secret keys and a malicious node placed in the immediate vicinity of one of them, who acts as a passive eavesdropper. To estimate the final SKG rate we evaluate the conditional min-entropy by taking into account all information available at the eavesdropper. Finally, we use this paper to announce the first ever physical layer security challenge, mirroring practices in cryptography. We call the community to scrutinize the presented results and try to “break” our SKG implementation. To this end, we provide, i) the full dataset observed by the eavesdroppers, ii) 20 blocks of 16−byte long ciphertexts, encrypted using one-time pad with 20 distilled secret keys, and, iii) all codes and software used in our SKG implementation. An attack will be considered successful if any part(s) of the plaintext are successfully retrieved.
Physical layer security (PLS) is seen as the means to enhance physical layer trustworthiness in 6G. This work provides a proof-of-concept for one of the most mature PLS technologies, i.e., secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients during the channel’s coherence time. As opposed to other works, where only specific parts of the protocol are typically investigated, here, we implement the full SKG chain in four indoor experimental campaigns. In detail, we consider two legitimate nodes, who use the wireless channel to extract secret keys and a malicious node placed in the immediate vicinity of one of them, who acts as a passive eavesdropper. To estimate the final SKG rate we evaluate the conditional min-entropy by taking into account all information available at the eavesdropper. Finally, we use this paper to announce the first ever physical layer security challenge, mirroring practices in cryptography. We call the community to scrutinize the presented results and try to “break” our SKG implementation. To this end, we provide, i) the full dataset observed by the eavesdroppers, ii) 20 blocks of 16−byte long ciphertexts, encrypted using one-time pad with 20 distilled secret keys, and, iii) all codes and software used in our SKG implementation. An attack will be considered successful if any part(s) of the plaintext are successfully retrieved.
Physical layer security (PLS) is seen as the means to enhance physical layer trustworthiness in 6G. This work provides a proof-of-concept for one of the most mature PLS technologies, i.e., secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients during the channel's coherence time. As opposed to other works, where only specific parts of the protocol are typically investigated, here, we implement the full SKG chain in four indoor experimental campaigns. In detail, we consider two legitimate nodes, who use the wireless channel to extract secret keys and a malicious node placed in the immediate vicinity of one of them, who acts as a passive eavesdropper. To estimate the final SKG rate we evaluate the conditional min-entropy by taking into account all information available at the eavesdropper. Finally, we use this paper to announce the first ever physical layer security challenge, mirroring practices in cryptography. We call the community to scrutinize the presented results and try to “break” our SKG implementation. To this end, we provide, i) the full dataset observed by the eavesdroppers, ii) 20 blocks of 16 - byte long ciphertexts, encrypted using one-time pad with 20 distilled secret keys, and, iii) all codes and software used in our SKG implementation. An attack will be considered successful if any part(s) of the plaintext are successfully retrieved.
Physical layer security (PLS) is seen as the means to enhance physical layer trustworthiness in 6G. This work provides a proof-of-concept for one of the most mature PLS technologies, i.e., secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients during the channel's coherence time. As opposed to other works, where only specific parts of the protocol are typically investigated, here, we implement the full SKG chain in four indoor experimental campaigns. In detail, we consider two legitimate nodes, who use the wireless channel to extract secret keys and a malicious node placed in the immediate vicinity of one of them, who acts as a passive eavesdropper. To estimate the final SKG rate we evaluate the conditional min-entropy by taking into account all information available at the eavesdropper. Finally, we use this paper to announce the first ever physical layer security challenge, mirroring practices in cryptography. We call the community to scrutinize the presented results and try to ``break'' our SKG implementation. To this end, we provide, i) the full dataset observed by the eavesdroppers, ii) 20 blocks of 16−byte long ciphertexts, encrypted using one-time pad with 20 distilled secret keys, and, iii) all codes and software used in our SKG implementation. An attack will be considered successful if any part(s) of the plaintext are successfully retrieved.
In this work we investigate the problem of secret key generation (SKG) between two communicating wireless devices, according to the physical-layer security paradigm. We propose a general framework for any communication channel or waveform. In details, we study a filterbank-based method, which allows the generation of secret security keys from a wideband radio channel, independently from the baseband modem implementation. We believe that channel awareness is of utmost importance to understand the applicability of SKG methods, i.e., knowing their secret bit-rate under different channel scenarios. For that purpose, we investigate the SKG performance by means of Monte Carlo simulations that collect radio channel statistics and obtain the SKG performance through mutual information numerical estimation.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of wireless communication, securing transmitted information remains a critical challenge. This study provides a comprehensive review of secret key generation (SKG) techniques designed to secure physical layer wireless communication channels. We focus on key generation methods that exploit physical layer characteristics such as channel state information, received signal strength, and bit error rate. The computational complexity of these techniques is also examined, emphasizing the trade-offs between security and efficiency for real-world implementations. The review identifies open challenges such as developing low-cost, resource-efficient systems, managing artificial noise, and addressing the impact of mobility and multiuser massive MIMO systems on SKG rates. Our findings aim to guide the development of more efficient, scalable SKG methods for next-generation wireless networks. Additionally, we propose a method for securely generating identical secret keys between nodes using Cuckoo filters and a Map-Reduce model for frame hashing, ensuring long-term security in IoT environments.