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KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems

Efficient key generation leveraging wireless channel reciprocity and discrete cosine transform

Furui Zhan, Nianmin Yao

Published May 31, 2017• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Key generation is essential for protecting wireless networks. Based on wireless channel reciprocity, transceivers can generate shared secret keys by measuring their communicating channels. However, due to non-simultaneous measurements, asymmetric noises and other interferences, channel measurements collected by different transceivers are highly correlated but not identical and thus might have some discrepancies. Further, these discrepancies might lead to mismatches of bit sequences after quantization. The referred mismatches significantly affect the efficiency of key generation. In this paper, an efficient key generation scheme leveraging wireless channel reciprocity is proposed. To reduce the bit mismatch rate and enhance the efficiency of key generation, the involved transceivers separately apply discrete cosine transform (DCT) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) to pre-process their measurements. Then, the outputs of IDCT are quantified and encoded to establish the bit sequence. With the implementations of information reconciliation and privacy amplification, the shared secret key can be generated. Several experiments in real environments are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. During each experiment, the shared key is established from the received signal strength (RSS) of heterogeneous devices. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently generate shared secret keys between transceivers.

DOI
10.3837/tiis.2017.05.022

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Key generation is essential for protecting wireless networks. Based on wireless channel reciprocity, transceivers can generate shared secret keys by measuring their communicating channels. However, due to non-simultaneous measurements, asymmetric noises and other interferences, channel measurements collected by different transceivers are highly correlated but not identical and thus might have some discrepancies. Further, these discrepancies might lead to mismatches of bit sequences after quantization. The referred mismatches significantly affect the efficiency of key generation. In this paper, an efficient key generation scheme leveraging wireless channel reciprocity is proposed. To reduce the bit mismatch rate and enhance the efficiency of key generation, the involved transceivers separately apply discrete cosine transform (DCT) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) to pre-process their measurements. Then, the outputs of IDCT are quantified and encoded to establish the bit sequence. With the implementations of information reconciliation and privacy amplification, the shared secret key can be generated. Several experiments in real environments are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. During each experiment, the shared key is established from the received signal strength (RSS) of heterogeneous devices. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently generate shared secret keys between transceivers.
Due to the reciprocity of wireless channels, the communication parties can directly extract the shared key from channel. This solution were verified through several schemes. However, in real situations, channel sampling of legitimate transceivers might be impacted by noises and other interferences, which makes the channel states obtained by initiator and responder might be obvious different. The efficiency and even availability of physical layer key generation are thus reduced. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient physical layer key generation scheme, which extract shared secret keys from channel state information (CSI). To improve the key generation process, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is employed to reduce differences of channel states of legitimate transceivers. Then, these outputs are quantified and encoded through multi-bit adaptive quantization(MAQ) quantizer and gray code to generate binary bit sequence, which can greatly reduce the bit error rate. Moreover, the low density parity check (LDPC) code and universal hashing functions are used to achieve information reconciliation and privacy amplifification. By adding preprocessing methods in the key generation process and using the rich information of CSI, the security of communications can be increased on the basis of improving the key generation rate. To evaluate this scheme, a number of experiments in various real environments are conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effificiently generate shared secret keys for nodes and protect their communication.
Abstract Wireless communications between two devices can be protected by secret keys. However, existing key generation schemes suffer from the high bit disagreement rate and low bit generation rate. In this paper, we propose an efficient physical layer key generation scheme by exploring the Received Signal Strength (RSS) of signals. In order to reduce the high mismatch rate of the measurements and to increase the key generation rate, a pair of transmitter and receiver separately apply adaptive quantization algorithm for quantifying the measurements. Then, we implement a randomness extractor to further increase key generation rate and ensure randomness of generated of keys. Several real-world experiments are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The results show that compared with the other related schemes, our scheme performs better in bit generation rate, bit disagreement rate, and randomness.
Physical-layer key generation has emerged as a promising avenue for establishing secret keys using reciprocal channel measurements between wireless devices. However, channel reciprocity may suffer degradation from ambient noise and cause mismatched secret bits, while existing methods mitigating this issue may yet face limitations in key efficiency. The root cause behind such limitations is the heavy reliance on channel measurements, which can be naturally susceptible to channel non-reciprocity attributed to environmental factors. Instead of direct key extraction from channel measurements, we seek to share a pre-defined key and utilize channel measurements as a bearer to facilitate key transmission. We propose an accurate and efficient key generation method (KeyCome) to ensure secure key sharing by encapsulating it with channel state information (CSI) obfuscation matrices through circulant convolution. To this end, we develop a reliable key derivation through a quadratic programming method with matrix equilibration, ensuring stable and rapid solutions. Notably, the transmitter can control the key beforehand for enhanced communication efficiency and combine it with an error correction mechanism for accurate key derivation. Furthermore, a lightweight reconciliation scheme is designed to minimize mismatched bits caused by occasional non-reciprocity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate KeyCome's high accuracy and efficiency in key generation.
Channel reciprocity is a very crucial component in establishing a secret key generation scheme. Non-simultaneous measurement conditions and noise cause low channel reciprocity, which is indicated by measurements of channel parameters that are not perfectly identical in both users. The stages of the secret key generation scheme that directly quantifies the channel parameters will have an impact on the high difference in the bits produced. In this paper, we propose the use of Modified Polynomial Regression methods to enhance channel reciprocity that would lower the rate of key disagreement between two users. We also propose a combination of the Modified Polynomial Regression method with multilevel quantization to overcome the trade-off between performance parameters, i.e. the key disagreement rate and key generation rate. The test results conducted in an indoor wireless environment show that our proposed scheme has better performance compared to the existing scheme in terms of increasing reciprocity, key generation rate and decreasing key disagreement rate. The resulting secret key has also fulfilled the randomness requirements set by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology statistical suite.
Secret key generation at physical layer has attracted more and more attentions as an emerging cryptography method. Compared to traditional security approaches, secret key generation at physical layer not only avoids the problem of key distribution, but also holds high efficiency and low complexity in application. Based on the principle of channel reciprocity, Alice and Bob both estimate the channel conditions and extract shared keys from this source of common randomness. In this paper, we first analyze the basic steps (channel estimation, sample quantization and key reconciliation) of secret key generation, key match rate with different quantization levels and key reconciliation times are also simulated. While in practical situations, different non-reciprocity factors affect the channel estimation step, key match rate can be greatly decreased and hardly meet real time cryptography requirements. In order to increase the key match rate, the unified framework of physical layer key generation has been extended to utilizing multiple observations of wireless channels to generate secret keys. An improved key generation approach with multiple observations can well deal with discrepancies between transceivers and keep increasing the key match rate. Theoretical analysis and simulation results both validate the significant improvement due to multiple observations. With an increased number of observations on both sides, the desired key match rate can be achieved much greater than with a single observation, and also the probability of key recovery by Eve can be decreased.
The inherent randomness of wireless radio channels can be employed to extract secrets, whenever the channel reciprocity holds. Privacy amplification is an ingredient step for removing the redundancy of key, of which, the mount of information leaked to potential eavesdroppers, is often difficult to determine. In this paper, we propose a secret-key generation scheme without privacy amplification, of which the disagreement of key is coordinated through the reconciliation of sample positions as did in the level-crossing scheme. Compared to the level-crossing scheme, the proposed approach accumulates the reliable samples and further employs multi-bit quantization for improving the rate of secret-key generation. The accumulated samples should be decorrelated for generating random keys. Through extensive simulations, we find that the Karhunen-Loève transform for decorrelation is very sensitive in implementation.