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IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

Intrinsic Information of Wideband Channels

Yuan Shen, Moe Z. Win

Published Aug 23, 2013• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The ability to exchange secret messages and protect against security attacks becomes increasingly important for providing information superiority and confidentiality in modern information systems. These systems require shared secret keys, which can be generated from common random sources with known distributions. However, the assumption on the distribution of the sources may not hold in many realistic scenarios. In this paper, we establish a mathematical framework for secret-key generation using common unknown deterministic sources (UDSs). In particular, we propose a new information measure called intrinsic information to characterize the achievable length of the secret key that can be generated from a UDS. As a case study, we consider a wideband propagation medium in mobile wireless networks as a UDS and derive its intrinsic information as a function of various network parameters. Our results provide a non-Bayesian perspective for secret-key generation as well as practical implications of this new perspective.

DOI
10.1109/jsac.2013.130919

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The ability to exchange secret messages and protect against security attacks becomes increasingly important for providing information superiority and confidentiality in modern information systems. These systems require shared secret keys, which can be generated from common random sources with known distributions. However, the assumption on the distribution of the sources may not hold in many realistic scenarios. In this paper, we establish a mathematical framework for secret-key generation using common unknown deterministic sources (UDSs). In particular, we propose a new information measure called intrinsic information to characterize the achievable length of the secret key that can be generated from a UDS. As a case study, we consider a wideband propagation medium in mobile wireless networks as a UDS and derive its intrinsic information as a function of various network parameters. Our results provide a non-Bayesian perspective for secret-key generation as well as practical implications of this new perspective.
Wireless networks are subject to security vulnerability due to the broadcasting nature of radio transmission. Information-theoretic approaches for secure communication propose to generate secret keys from a common source, such as reciprocal channels, available to the transmitter and receiver. However, such approaches assume the probability distribution of the sources, which may not be available in many realistic scenarios. In this paper, we establish an information-theoretic framework for secret-key generation (SKG) using noisy observations of unknown deterministic parameters (UDPs). Based on an axiomatic definition of UDPs, we derive a new metric called intrinsic information between the UDP and its observation, characterizing the rate of the secret key that can be generated from the observation. This metric is then applied to quantify the use of wideband channels in mobile networks for SKG. Our results provide a non-Bayesian perspective for SKG as well as its practical implications.
In wireless decentralized networks, security and privacy become more challenging due to stringent architecture and sometimes low-complexity constraints. Confidentiality of the transmissions is usually achieved by symmetric cryptography, which implies the distribution of identical secret keys to the legitimate nodes. Classical solutions for symmetric key distribution can be too complex from a computational or infrastructural point of view. An alternative would be physical layer key generation, which exploits the radio channel as a source of common information. This paper looks into the generation of secret keys from Impulse Radio - Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) channels using low-power integrated devices. We investigate the possibility to generate identical secret bit sequences in practical environments (e.g., possibly occupied indoor rooms) and operating conditions (e.g., mobility) under specific hardware limitations inherent to device integration (e.g., time resolution and signal dynamics). The main challenge is to obtain reciprocal and random bits at an acceptable rate. Taking into account these three criteria (i.e., reciprocity, randomness, and key length), we describe and evaluate a new quantization scheme adapted to the channel impulse responses acquired by real devices.
We develop a secret key generation scheme using phase estimation in ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless fading channels.Based on the reciprocity theorem, two terminals extract the phase of the channel as a common random source to generate secret bits.Moreover, we study the secret key rate by a pair of nodes observing correlated sources and communicating to achieve secret key agreement over public communication channels.As our main results, we establish a more practical upper bound from Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) and compare it with a universally theoretical upper bound on the shared maximum key rate from mutual information of correlated random sources.Derivation and numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the bound.Simulation studies are also provided to validate feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Wireless channel reciprocity can be exploited by two users willing to achieve confidential communications over a public channel as a common source of randomness for the generation of a secret key. This paper presents an analytical framework for investigating the amount of secret information that characterizes wireless multi-dimensional Gaussian channels used as source of randomness. The intrinsic secrecy content of wide-sense stationary wireless channels in frequency, time and spatial domains is derived through asymptotic analysis. Some significant case studies are presented, where single and multiple antenna eavesdroppers are considered. In the numerical results, the role of signal-to-noise ratio, spatial correlation, frequency and time selectivity, sampling frequency and imperfect channel reciprocity is investigated.
Secure wireless communications is a challenging problem due to the shared nature of the wireless medium. Most existing security protocols apply cryptographic techniques for bit scrambling at the application layer by exploiting a shared secret key between pairs of communicating nodes. However, more recent research argues that multipath propagation - a salient feature of wireless channels - provides a physical resource for secure communications. In this context, we propose a protocol that exploits the inherent randomness in multipath wireless channels for generating secret keys through channel estimation and quantization. Our approach is particularly attractive in wideband channels which exhibit a large number of statistically independent degrees of freedom (DoF), thereby enabling the generation of large, more-secure, keys. We show that the resulting keys are distinct for distinct pairwise links with a probability that increases exponentially with the key-size/channel DoF. We also characterize the probability that the two users sharing a common link generate the same key. This characterization is used to analyze the energy consumption in successful acquisition of a secret key by the two users. For a given key size, our results show that there is an optimum transmit power, and an optimum quantization strategy, that minimizes the energy consumption. The proposed approach to secret key generation through channel quantization also obviates the problem of key pre-distribution inherent to many existing cryptographic approaches.
To guarantee a secure wireless communication between any two transceivers, the shared secret key is a requirement. Communication parties need to encrypt the message with the key to impede an adversary's eavesdropping. By exploiting Ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless fading channels as a source of common randomness, two transceivers with correlated observations can generate secret keys with information-theoretical security. The state of the art of existing works, however, has neglected to consider efficient channel probing. In this paper, we define a channel probing factor to adaptively change probing interval for obtaining more correlated measurements at the endpoints of wireless communicating link. We use multipath relative delay of UWB channel to generate secret keys. Simulation results show that this dynamic secret key generation mechanism extracting multipath relative delay can achieve good performance in terms of secret key generation rate, key randomness and key-mismatch probability, especially key-mismatch probability compared with received signal strength (RSS)-based method and our prior approach. Furthermore, security analysis is also provided to validate feasibility of the scheme.