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arXiv:2503.08632 · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Secret-Key Generation From Private Identifiers Under Channel Uncertainty

Vamoua Yachongka, Rémi A. Chou

Published Jan 1, 2025• 4 citations
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Abstract

This study investigates secret-key generation for device authentication using physical identifiers, such as responses from physical unclonable functions (PUFs). The system includes two legitimate terminals (encoder and decoder) and an eavesdropper (Eve), each with access to different measurements of the identifier. From the device identifier, the encoder generates a secret key, which is securely stored in a private database, along with helper data that is saved in a public database accessible by the decoder for key reconstruction. Eve, who also has access to the public database, may use both her own measurements and the helper data to attempt to estimate the secret key and identifier. Our setup focuses on authentication scenarios where channel statistics are uncertain, with the involved parties employing multiple antennas to enhance signal reception. Our contributions include deriving inner and outer bounds on the optimal trade-off among secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates for general discrete sources, and showing that these bounds are tight for Gaussian sources.

DOI
10.1109/tifs.2025.3623929

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This study investigates secret-key generation for device authentication using physical identifiers, such as responses from physical unclonable functions (PUFs). The system includes two legitimate terminals (encoder and decoder) and an eavesdropper (Eve), each with access to different measurements of the identifier. From the device identifier, the encoder generates a secret key, which is securely stored in a private database, along with helper data that is saved in a public database accessible by the decoder for key reconstruction. Eve, who also has access to the public database, may use both her own measurements and the helper data to attempt to estimate the secret key and identifier. Our setup focuses on authentication scenarios where channel statistics are uncertain, with the involved parties employing multiple antennas to enhance signal reception. Our contributions include deriving inner and outer bounds on the optimal trade-off among secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates for general discrete sources, and showing that these bounds are tight for Gaussian sources.
The problem of secret-key based authentication under privacy and storage constraints on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurement channels during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained action sequence. Single-letter inner and outer bounds for the keyleakage-storage-cost regions are derived for a generalization of a classic two-terminal key agreement model with an eavesdropper that observes a sequence that is correlated with the sequences observed by the legitimate terminals. The additions to the model are that the encoder observes a noisy version of a remote source, and the noisy output and the remote source output together with an action sequence are given as inputs to the measurement channel at the decoder. Thus, correlation is introduced between the noise components on the encoder and decoder measurements. The model with a secret key generated by an encoder is extended to the randomized models, where a secret-key is embedded to the encoder. The results are relevant for several user and device authentication scenarios including physical and biometric identifiers with multiple measurements that provide diversity and multiplexing gains. To illustrate the behavior of the rate region, achievable (secret-key rate, storage-rate, cost) tuples are given for binary identifiers and measurement channels that can be represented as a mixture of binary symmetric subchannels. The gains from using an action sequence such as a large secret-key rate at a significantly small hardware cost, are illustrated to motivate the use of low-complexity transform-coding algorithms with cost-constrained actions.
In this paper, the problem of key generation over an unauthenticated public channel in a network setup is considered. The considered model consists of four terminals: two legitimate terminals who need to share a key, a helper and an active adversary. The legitimate terminals and the helper are allowed to exchange messages over a public noiseless channel, to which the adversary has full access and may modify messages exchanged through this public channel. We investigate two types of keys: secret key (secure from the adversary only) and private key (secure from both the helper and the adversary). We characterize the relationship between the key rates in our model and the existing models with a passive adversary. We characterize conditions under which the generated key rates in this model are non-zero, and further provide an authentication scheme to show that key capacities, if are non-zero, are the same as those for the scenario with a passive adversary.
Secret-key agreement based on biometric or physical identifiers is a promising security protocol for authenticating users or devices with small chips and has been extensively studied recently. Kittichokechai and Caire (2015) investigated the optimal trade-off in a secret-key agreement model with physical identifiers, where the structure of the authentication channels is similar to the wiretap channels, from information theoretic approaches. Later, the model was extended by Günlü et al. (2018) introducing noise in the enrollment phase and cost-constrained actions at the decoder. The results of these studies show that two auxiliary random variables are involved in the expressions of the optimal rate regions of secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates. However, with these two auxiliary random variables, the complexity of computing the rate region may be prohibitively high. Due to this problem, we are interested in exploring classes of authentication channels that need only one auxiliary random variable in the capacity region expression for discrete source settings. The result shows for the class of degraded and less noisy authentication channels, a single auxiliary random variable is sufficient to express the capacity region of the model. As an example, we also derive the capacity region of secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates for binary sources. Furthermore, the capacity region for scalar Gaussian sources is derived under Gaussian authentication channels.
This paper investigates the secret key generation from multiple cooperative sources. We assume that the public communication between the legitimate users has unlimited capacity. In this case, the secret key rate is the upper bound of a practical system with limited public communication. The random signals from the multiple helpers can help to create correlated Gaussian sources for the legitimate users to generate secret key, and only local channel state information (CSI) is needed by the helpers to cooperate with others. The power allocation between the helpers is studied with a total transmit power constraint, which results in a non-convex optimization problem. A high efficiency sub-optimal solution is proposed. And even when the legitimate users have no idea about the eavesdropper, the scheme still can help the system to achieve fairly good performance.
Encrypting information with pre-agreed key is an effective method to ensure information security. With the increasing requirement for key rate, this paper investigates the problem of simultaneously generating a secret key (SK) and a private key (PK) over three legitimate terminals with a trusted helper via public discussion that a passive eavesdropper completely access to. The legitimate terminals and the helper observe the correlated source sequences from the outputs of discrete memoryless source (DMS). The legitimate terminals wish to generate an SK that is concealed from the eavesdropper, and two designated legitimate terminals want to generate a PK that needs to be additionally keep secret from the third legitimate terminal. Under this model, the SK-PK capacity region is fully characterized, and the source coding scheme is further provided to show that the region is achievable. The security performance of the generated keys is analyzed in terms of key leakage rate.