Secret Key Agreement over a Pair of Independent Broadcast Channels

Hadi Ahmadi, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini

Secret Key Establishment (SKE) over a pair of independent Discrete Memoryless Broadcast Channels (DMBCs) was studied in where lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity were provided. In this paper, we study the above setup for two cases: (1) the DMBCs have “secrecy potential”, and (2) the DMBCs are stochastically degraded with independent channels. For (1), we propose a simple SKE protocol using the novel Interactive Channel Coding (ICC) method and prove that it achieves the lower bound. For (2), we give a simplified expression for the lower bound and prove that, when one of the legitimate parties sends only i.i.d. variables, the lower bound is tight and the capacity is achieved by a two-round protocol.

Onur Günlü, Rafael F. Schaefer

Bhavana Kanukurthi, Leonid Reyzin

Hadi Ahmadi, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini

We consider the problem of secret key establishment (SKE) in the presence of a passive adversary, Eve, when Alice and Bob are connected by a pair of independent discrete memoryless broadcast channels in opposite directions. We refer to this setup as 2DMBC. We define the secret-key capacity in this setup and provide a lower bound on the capacity by proposing a two-round SKE protocol. We also prove an upper bound and show that the two bounds coincide in the case of degraded 2DMBCs.

Reihaneh Safavi–Naini, Huaxiong Wang

Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani, Shaunak Mishra, Christina Fragouli +1 more

We consider a group of m trusted and authenticated nodes that aim to create a shared secret key K over a wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper Eve. We assume that there exists a state-dependent wireless broadcast channel from one of the honest nodes to the rest of them including Eve. All of the trusted nodes can also discuss over a cost-free, noiseless and unlimited rate public channel which is also overheard by Eve. For this setup, we develop an information-theoretically secure secret key agreement protocol. We show the optimality of this protocol for “linear deterministic” wireless broadcast channels. This model generalizes the packet erasure model studied in the literature for wireless broadcast channels. Here, the main idea is to convert a deterministic channel into multiple independent erasure channels by using superposition coding. For “state-dependent Gaussian” wireless broadcast channels, by using insights from the deterministic problem, we propose an achievability scheme based on a multi-layer wiretap code. By using the wiretap code, we can mimic the phenomenon of converting the wireless channel into multiple independent erasure channels. Then, finding the best achievable secret key generation rate leads to solving a non-convex power allocation problem over these channels (layers). We show that using a dynamic programming algorithm, one can obtain the best power allocation for this problem. Moreover, we prove the optimality of the proposed achievability scheme for the regime of high-SNR and large-dynamic range over the channel states in the (generalized) degrees of freedom sense.