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IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC)

Secret key generation in MIMO wireless systems using precoded channel measurements

Saygın Bakşi, Dimitrie C. Popescu

Published Oct 1, 2017• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Secret key generation using channel measurements has emerged as a meaningful approach to enhance the security of a wireless link at the physical layer. This paper presents a novel approach to key generation based on precoding of the MIMO channel measurements, that does not require information on the channel statistics and has the ability to generate key bits at a rate that is independent of the channel coherence time. The proposed approach is illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations showing the probability of bit disagreement between keys generated at transmitter/receiver side and Slepian-Wolf encoding with LDPC codes is used for key reconciliation.

DOI
10.1109/pimrc.2017.8292212

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Secret key generation using channel measurements has emerged as a meaningful approach to enhance the security of a wireless link at the physical layer. This paper presents a novel approach to key generation based on precoding of the MIMO channel measurements, that does not require information on the channel statistics and has the ability to generate key bits at a rate that is independent of the channel coherence time. The proposed approach is illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations showing the probability of bit disagreement between keys generated at transmitter/receiver side and Slepian-Wolf encoding with LDPC codes is used for key reconciliation.
Secret key generation based on channel measurements has emerged as a meaningful approach to enhance the security of wireless links. The key generation mechanism takes advantage of wireless channel reciprocity and uses the mutual information between legitimate users' channel measurements. However, the rate at which key bits are generated depends on the channel coherence time. Furthermore, eavesdroppers may obtain information to generate the secret key bits if their channels become correlated to the legitimate channels. In this paper, we propose a new approach for key generation that uses MIMO precoding and role switching by legitimate users during the key generation process in order to prevent an eavesdropper whose channel is correlated with the legitimate channel to acquire information that can be used to generate the encryption key, while also ensuring that the rate at which uncorrelated key bits are generated does not depend on the channel coherence time. The proposed approach is supported by an information theoretic analysis and is illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations showing that, even when the legitimate and eavesdropper channels are correlated, the bit mismatch rate at the eavesdropper does not improve with increasing SNR, while that at the legitimate users improves.
Physical layer approaches for generating secret encryption keys for wireless systems using channel information has attracted increased interest from researchers in recent years. This paper presents a new approach for secret key generation that is based on one-bit quantization of channel measurements along with log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) that are calculated based on the difference between channel estimates at legitimate reciprocal nodes. The proposed approach, which implements advantage distillation along with information reconciliation using Slepian-Wolf low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, is discussed and illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations. These show the probability of bit disagreement for keys generated through the proposed approach and compare it with that of alternative methods for key generation based on channel state information.
Recently, shared secret key generation from wireless channel characteristics has attracted a lot of attention due to its low computational overhead. However, in a static environment, the secret key rate is relatively lower due to the lack of channel time-variation. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient PLKG scheme for static channels. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter attaches the information of the secret key into the downlink pilot signals to the legitimate receiver by the proposed secret precoding. At the receiving end, the legitimate receiver can directly observe the correct information of secret key from the public downlink pilot signals, while keeping perfect secrecy of the generated key against eavesdroppers. The key principle lies in that the information of the secret key is coded in the index of the non-activated MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) sub-channel. Consequently, only the legitimate receiver can accurately observe the value of the key information. For any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from the legitimate transmitter and receiver, it is proven that she cannot observe any key information from her received signals. Therefore, the key rate can be improved for the static channels by increasing the symbol rate of the pilot signals. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Physical-layer secret key generation is a meaningful approach to enhance the security of wireless links by taking advantages of wireless channels. However eavesdroppers may obtain the secret key bits if their channels become correlated to the legitimate channels. In this paper, to increase the mismatch rate at the eavesdroppers, we propose a new secret key generation scheme for polar coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by applying MIMO precoding and adding signal-like noise on the transmitted signals. Furthermore, considering the channel polarization phenomenon of polar codes, we propose to adaptively send messages that are used for secret key generation over the less reliable channel-bits of eavesdroppers. In addition, we propose to add randomness to messages to ensure that eavesdroppers are unable to generate the secret key bits even when their channels are highly correlated to the legitimate channels. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme prevents eavesdroppers to generate the secret key with an extremely high probability.
In future wireless communication systems, more and more small low-power mobile devices will communicate without infrastructure and internet access. In order to provide a lightweight yet powerful security mechanism, physical layer parameters can be used to generate secret keys for perfect secrecy. In this paper, we study the optimal operation of a multiple antenna link with statistical channel state information at all nodes for secret key generation. The impact of spatial correlation on the achievable secret key rates is characterized. Furthermore, the optimal pilot precoding during channel estimation is computed. Numerical simulations illustrate the results for selected scenarios.
An emerging area of interest in wireless security is the generation of secret encryption keys by leveraging the features of the physical propagation channel. The shared randomness of the wireless channel between two legitimate nodes in a communication network is exploited to provide strong secrecy. The secret keys are generated based on fluctuations or evolution of the wireless channel state. However, to the best of our knowledge, little work has been performed on algorithms to exploit the increased randomness available to wireless nodes equipped with MIMO antennas. In this paper, we present a practical key generation scheme for MIMO channels based on quantization performed on blind channel estimates. Our schemes generate random keys for transmitter and receiver by simultaneously quantizing the blind channel estimates. Our schemes are simulated for a realistic fading channel model, and performance metrics for error rate and efficiency are provided.