Secure Communications Using Secret Keys Generated from Noise

Masoud Ghoreishi Madiseh, Michael L. McGuire, Stephen S. Neville +2 more

It has been shown that the radio channel impulse response for a pair of legitimate Ultra-wide band (UWB) transceivers can be used to generate secret keys for secure communications. Past proposed secret key generation algorithms under-exploited the available number of secret key bits from the radio channel. This paper proposes a new efficient method for generation of the shared key where the transceivers use LDPC decoders to resolve the differences in their channel impulse response measurements caused by measurement noise. To ensure secret key agreement, a method of public discussion between the two users is performed using the syndrome from Hamming (7,3) binary codes. An algorithm is proposed to check the equality of generated keys for both legitimate users, and ensure error-free secure communication. The security of this algorithm has been verified by AVISPA. Comparisons are performed with previous work on secret key generation and it has been shown that this algorithm reliably generates longer secret keys in standard UWB radio channels.

Pramode K. Verma, Mayssaa El Rifai, Kam Wai Clifford Chan

Germán Bassi, Pablo Piantanida, Shlomo Shitz Shamai

Mike Yuliana, Wirawan Wirawan, Suwadi Suwadi

Secure communication in a wireless environment is very vital, and cryptographic schemes are usually used to ensure it. Secret keys that are unknown to the tappers are needed by cryptographic schemes to secure communication between two legitimate users. In recent years the secret key generation scheme that utilizes a wireless channel as a secret key generation source has become a very interesting and promising topic. The main problem of this scheme is the high wireless channel mismatch between two users due to nonsimultaneous measurements and noise from the device. In this paper, we proposed a secret key generation scheme that uses the Savitzky-Golay filter method to reduce the high mismatch wireless channel. The scheme that was built was also equipped with a multibit quantization method to increase the speed of generation of secret keys. The results of our tests show a decrease in wireless channel mismatch between two users and an increase in the speed of generation of secret keys.

Hadi Ahmadi, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini

Jiarui Zhang, Xiaosheng Liu, Ying Cui +1 more

Due to the inherent broadcast nature, power line communication (PLC) is vulnerable to eavesdropping. Traditionally, the secret keys are generated/distributed by pre-shared keys, adaptive tone mapping, or asymmetric encryption algorithm. All of these methods face problems such as high computational complexity, high cost, or less security. To solve the problem, a physical layer security (PLS)-based secret key generation (SKG) scheme aiming at the typical in-home broadband PLC network is proposed in this paper. However, the slowly time-varying characteristic and the serious noise interference in PLC channels will degrade the performance of the PLS-based SKG scheme. To break through the limitation of the randomness of PLC channels, two-way random signals are introduced. To make the SKG system more resistant to noise, the channel frequency response-based adaptive quantization (CFR-AQ) algorithm is designed, in which the amplitude threshold and the quantization level are adaptive to the noise power and the target key disagreement rate (KDR) to maximize the key generation rate (KGR). The performance is analyzed in two scenarios: single eavesdropper and multiple eavesdroppers. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a good overall performance in terms of KDR, KGR, and security with a lower complexity in the presence of single or multiple non-collusive eavesdroppers, and it can be regarded as an alternative solution to generate secret keys in PLC networks.