It is known that noise on communication channels can be a powerful resource for certain cryptographic purposes, basically by utilizing the randomness to ensure the secrecy. In this paper, we study information theoretically secure key agreement through the use of the additive white Gaussian noise channel and public discussion. We present a protocol for key agreement that defines the computation and communications between the two communicating parties to share a common secret information, about which negligible amount of information is revealed to other third parties. We discuss the signal design, secrecy and the achievable rate of the protocol.
It is known that noise on communication channels can be a powerful resource for certain cryptographic purposes, basically by utilizing the randomness to ensure the secrecy. In this paper, we study information theoretically secure key agreement through the use of the additive white Gaussian noise channel and public discussion. We present a protocol for key agreement that defines the computation and communications between the two communicating parties to share a common secret information, about which negligible amount of information is revealed to other third parties. We discuss the signal design, secrecy and the achievable rate of the protocol.
We study the signal sets for information theoretically secure key agreement with public discussion over the Gaussian and flat fading channels. Alice transmits signals to Bob over a noisy channel while Eve receives signals through an independent noisy channel. By utilizing this noisy resource, Alice and Bob wish to share a secret key on which Eve has a negligible amount of information. We present a protocol that allows Alice and Bob to share a common secret information, and encompass the signal sets for an efficient protocol in information theoretic sense.
Secure communication ensures the integrity and confidentiality of communication between connected devices. An information-theoretic approach to secure communication gives the strongest confidentiality guarantee by assuming that the attacker has unlimited computing power. The earliest formal model and definition of information-theoretic secure communication is by Shannon, who employed a secret key shared between communicating parties to provide confidentiality. An alternative elegant information-theoretic approach to secure communication views the natural characteristics of the environment (i.e., channel’s noise) as a resource to build security functionalities. This approach was first proposed by Wyner, and the corresponding secure communication model is called the wiretap channel model. These two approaches introduce two primary resources for providing information-theoretic secure communication: the shared secret key and physical properties of the communication medium. In this thesis, we study how to employ the above two resources for secure message transmission. We study this by using channel’s noise in the wiretap channel model. In this model, a sender is connected to the receiver and the adversary through two noisy channels. We propose a new wiretap encoding scheme with strong secrecy that provides perfect secrecy and reliability, asymptotically. The construction treats the noise in the adversary’s channel as a source of randomness that is extracted and used to hide the message from the adversary. We realize the wiretap channel model using cooperative jamming to evaluate the performance of wiretap codes in practice. We consider a model called keyed wiretap channel that unifies Wyner’s model with Shannon’s model of perfect secrecy for information systems, and propose a keyed encoding schemes with strong secrecy and other properties that are attractive in practice. We also study two-party information-theoretic secret key agreement when the two parties have access to samples of a common source of randomness and use a single message transmission to arrive at a shared random key. We propose a secret key agreement protocol in this setting, prove its security, and show its superior performance compared to other known protocols with the same properties. Finally, we propose an information-theoretic secret key agreement over a virtual wiretap channel created by cooperative jamming.
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.
The problem of generating a shared secret key S by two parties knowing dependent random variables X and Y, respectively, but not sharing a secret key initially, is considered. An enemy who knows the random variable Z, jointly distributed with X and Y according to some probability distribution P/sub XYZ/, can also receive all messages exchanged by the two parties over a public channel. The goal of a protocol is that the enemy obtains at most a negligible amount of information about S. Upper bounds on H(S) as a function of P/sub XYZ/ are presented. Lower bounds on the rate H(S)/N (as N to infinity ) are derived for the case in which X=(X/sub 1/, . . ., X/sub N/), Y=(Y/sub 1/, . . ., Y/sub N/) and Z=(Z/sub 1/, . . ., Z/sub N/) result from N independent executions of a random experiment generating X/sub i/, Y/sub i/ and Z/sub i/ for i=1, . . ., N. It is shown that such a secret key agreement is possible for a scenario in which all three parties receive the output of a binary symmetric source over independent binary symmetric channels, even when the enemy's channel is superior to the other two channels.>
This paper is concerned with secret-key agreement by public discussion. Assume that two parties Alice and Bob and an adversary Eve have access to independent realizations of random variables X, Y, and Z, respectively, with joint distribution P/sub XYZ/. The secret-key rate S(X;Y/spl par/Z) has been defined as the maximal rate at which Alice and Bob can generate a secret key by communication over an insecure, but authenticated channel such that Eve's information about this key is arbitrarily small. We define a new conditional mutual information measure, the intrinsic conditional mutual information between S and Y when given Z, denoted by I(X;Y/spl darr/Z), which is an upper bound on S(X;Y/spl par/Z). The special scenarios are analyzed where X, Y, and Z are generated by sending a binary random variable R, for example a signal broadcast by a satellite, over independent channels, or two scenarios in which Z is generated by sending X and Y over erasure channels. In the first two scenarios it can be shown that the secret-key rate is strictly positive if and only if I(X;Y/spl darr/Z) is strictly positive. For the third scenario, a new protocol is presented which allows secret-key agreement even when all the previously known protocols fail.
We study the problem of information-theoretically secure secret key agreement under the well-known source model and channel model. In both of these models the parties wish to create a shared secret key that is secure from an eavesdropper with unlimited computational resources. In the channel model, the first party can choose a sequence of inputs to a discrete memoryless channel, which has outputs at the other parties and at the eavesdropper. After each channel use, the parties can engage in arbitrarily many rounds of interactive authenticated communication over a public channel. At the end, each party should be able to generate the key. In the source model, the parties wishing to generate a secret key (as well as the eavesdropper) receive a certain number of independent identically distributed copies of jointly distributed random variables after which the parties are allowed interactive authenticated public communication, at the end of which each party should be able to generate the key. We derive new lower and upper bounds on the secret key rate under the source model and the channel model, and introduce a technique for proving that a given expression bounds the secrecy rate from above in the channel model. Our lower bounds strictly improve what is essentially the best known lower bound in both the source model and the channel model. Our upper bound in the channel model strictly improves the current state of art upper bound. We do not know whether our new upper bound in the source model represents an strict improvement but it includes the current best known bound as a special case.