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IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Cooperative Key Agreement for Wireless Networking: Key Rates and Practical Protocol Design

Ning Wang, Ning Zhang, Thomas Aaron Gulliver

Published Jan 24, 2014• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the design of a practical information-theoretically secure secret key agreement protocol for a cooperative wireless network employing standard modulation. Assuming relay selection has been completed, the key agreement problem is studied in a three-node cooperative wireless communication system over block-fading channels. Passive attacks from an eavesdropper collocated with the relay are considered. We derive upper and lower bounds on the secret key rate of this cooperative wireless system. The difference between the bounds is shown to be small for practical communication scenarios, which indicates they are tight. We then propose a practical secret key agreement protocol for this system with both the communicants and the honest relay participating in the public discussion. The tradeoff between security and protocol efficiency is considered in the joint design of advantage distillation, information reconciliation, and privacy amplification. The protocol parameters are optimized to achieve the tight bound on the secret key rate.

DOI
10.1109/tifs.2013.2293113

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In this paper, we investigate the design of a practical information-theoretically secure secret key agreement protocol for a cooperative wireless network employing standard modulation. Assuming relay selection has been completed, the key agreement problem is studied in a three-node cooperative wireless communication system over block-fading channels. Passive attacks from an eavesdropper collocated with the relay are considered. We derive upper and lower bounds on the secret key rate of this cooperative wireless system. The difference between the bounds is shown to be small for practical communication scenarios, which indicates they are tight. We then propose a practical secret key agreement protocol for this system with both the communicants and the honest relay participating in the public discussion. The tradeoff between security and protocol efficiency is considered in the joint design of advantage distillation, information reconciliation, and privacy amplification. The protocol parameters are optimized to achieve the tight bound on the secret key rate.
We study practical information-theoretically secure secret key agreement protocol design for wireless cooperative communication networks. By assuming the relay selection process is finished in advance, we study the key agreement problem for a classical three-node cooperative wireless communication system over independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Passive attacks from an eavesdropper collocated with the relay are assumed. We derive upper and lower bounds on the secret key rate under the assumed cooperative wireless system model and find that they are close, which indicates the tightness of the bounds. We then propose an efficient practical secret key agreement protocol with both Bob and the honest relay participating in the public discussion. A compromise between security and efficiency is achieved by the joint advantage distillation and privacy amplification.
We consider a group of m trusted nodes that aim to create a shared secret key K, using a state-dependent wireless broadcast channel that exists from one of the honest nodes to the rest of the nodes including a passive eavesdropper Eve. All of the trusted nodes can also discuss over a cost-free and unlimited rate public channel which is also observed 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 as well as in the high-SNR regime for wireless channels with large dynamic range over channel states.
Information-theoretic secrecy is combined with cryptographic secrecy to create a secret-key exchange protocol for wireless networks. A network of transmitters, which already have cryptographically secured channels between them, cooperate to exchange a secret key with a new receiver at a random location, in the presence of passive eavesdroppers at unknown locations. Two spatial point processes, homogeneous Poisson process and independent uniformly distributed points, are used for the spatial distributions of transmitters and eavesdroppers. We analyse the impact of the number of cooperating transmitters and the number of eavesdroppers on the area fraction where secure communication is possible. Upper bounds on the probability of existence of positive secrecy between the cooperating transmitters and the receiver are derived. The closeness of the upper bounds to the real value is then estimated by means of numerical simulations. Simulations also indicate that a deterministic spatial distribution for the transmitters, for example, hexagonal and square lattices, increases the probability of existence of positive secrecy capacity compared to the random spatial distributions. For the same number of friendly nodes, cooperative transmitting provides a dramatically larger secrecy region than cooperative jamming and cooperative relaying.
This paper considers the transmission of confidential data over wireless channels. Based on an information-theoretic formulation of the problem, in which two legitimates partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through a second independent quasi-static fading channel, the important role of fading is characterized in terms of average secure communication rates and outage probability. Based on the insights from this analysis, a practical secure communication protocol is developed, which uses a four-step procedure to ensure wireless information-theoretic security: (i) common randomness via opportunistic transmission, (ii) message reconciliation, (iii) common key generation via privacy amplification, and (iv) message protection with a secret key. A reconciliation procedure based on multilevel coding and optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is introduced, which allows to achieve communication rates close to the fundamental security limits in several relevant instances. Finally, a set of metrics for assessing average secure key generation rates is established, and it is shown that the protocol is effective in secure key renewal—even in the presence of imperfect channel state information.
The impact of relay nodes on the secret key generation via the physical layer resources is investigated. A novel relay-assisted strategy is proposed to improve the generated secret key rate. The main idea is to exploit the random channels associated with relay nodes in the network as additional random sources for the key generation. This approach is particularly useful when the channels between legitimate nodes change slowly. Four increasingly sophisticated yet more practical scenarios are studied, for which relay-assisted key generation protocols are proposed and are shown to be optimal or order-optimal in terms of the key rate. It is also shown that the multiplexing gain in the key rate scales linearly with the number of relays, which demonstrates that relay-assisted schemes substantially increase the key rate. This is in sharp contrast to scenarios with relays helping information transmission, in which the multiplexing gain does not scale with the number of relays. Furthermore, a cooperative scheme is also proposed in which relays help key generation but the generated keys are kept secure from these relays.
In Part I of this two-part paper on confidential communication over wireless channels, we studied the fundamental security limits of quasi-static fading channels from the point of view of outage secrecy capacity with perfect and imperfect channel state information. In Part II, we develop a practical secret key agreement protocol for Gaussian and quasi-static fading wiretap channels. The protocol uses a four-step procedure to secure communications: establish common randomness via an opportunistic transmission, perform message reconciliation, establish a common key via privacy amplification, and use of the key. We introduce a new reconciliation procedure that uses multilevel coding and optimized low density parity check codes which in some cases comes close to achieving the secrecy capacity limits established in Part I. Finally, we develop new metrics for assessing average secure key generation rates and show that our protocol is effective in secure key renewal.