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Electronics Letters

Performance analysis in wireless key generation using estimated channel state information

Xinrong Guan, Hui Shi, Ning Ding, Weiwei Yang, Yueming Cai

Published Aug 14, 2018• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A secret key can be generated between two legitimate parties from observations of the common wireless channel. However, key disagreement usually occurs due to the estimation errors. Considering a guard band, the key disagreement rate (KDR) is firstly derived in a closed‐form expression. Although increasing the size of the guard band can decrease KDR; the length of the raw key bit sequence is also shortened. To evaluate such an effect, the raw key generation rate is defined and derived. The simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and are useful for the determination of pilot power and guard band size.

DOI
10.1049/el.2018.5696

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A secret key can be generated between two legitimate parties from observations of the common wireless channel. However, key disagreement usually occurs due to the estimation errors. Considering a guard band, the key disagreement rate (KDR) is firstly derived in a closed‐form expression. Although increasing the size of the guard band can decrease KDR; the length of the raw key bit sequence is also shortened. To evaluate such an effect, the raw key generation rate is defined and derived. The simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and are useful for the determination of pilot power and guard band size.
The basis of generating secret key from the common wireless channel at two communication parties is reciprocity. However, due to non-simultaneous measurements and unavoidable estimation error, bias always exists and key disagreement occurs. In this paper, performance analysis and improvements for key generation exploiting imperfect channel statement information (CSI) is studied. Firstly, the closed-form expression for key disagreement rate (KDR) is derived to evaluate the key mismatch caused by time delay and estimation error. Secondly, the energy efficiency involving power allocation between key generation and private data transmission is presented. After that, a neural network based prediction (NNBP) algorithm is proposed to improve the key consistency. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and show that NNBP achieves significant improvements. And it's interesting to find that NNBP algorithm achieves a higher performance gain in low signal-to-noise ration (SNR) and high delay condition, which is different from other methods, like guard band based quantizer (GBBQ).
The basis of generating secret key from the common wireless channel at two communication parties is reciprocity. However, due to non-simultaneous measurements and unavoidable estimation error, bias always exists and key disagreement occurs. In this paper, performance analysis and improvements for key generation exploiting imperfect channel statement information (CSI) is studied. Firstly, the closed-form expression for key disagreement rate (KDR) is derived to evaluate the key mismatch caused by time delay and estimation error. Secondly, the energy efficiency involving power allocation between key generation and private data transmission is presented. After that, a neural network based prediction (NNBP) algorithm is proposed to improve the key consistency. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and show that NNBP achieves significant improvements. And it's interesting to find that NNBP algorithm achieves a higher performance gain in low signal-to-noise ration (SNR) and high delay condition, which is different from other methods, like guard band based quantizer (GBBQ).
Abstract Wireless propagation channels can be used to obtain secret keys to enhance security. By exploiting the reciprocity of the channel between legitimate users and its independence of an eavesdropper's channel, it can be quantised to produce a string of bits. The quality of these bits can be enhanced by using guard bands when quantising, which means that some samples are not used due to their poor quality. Although this increases the probability that the legitimate users produce the same bits, it also reduces the number of generated bits. We derive the optimal trade‐off between these contrasting quantities, first for a single sample and then extended to a frequency‐selective channel. The results are presented for both software simulations and hardware evaluations.
Wireless channel key generation technology is an important mechanism to guarantee the security of wireless network, but influenced by the key length and the actual electromagnetic environment, wireless channel key generation technology is faced with the challenge of high-key generation rate (KGR) and low-key disagreement rate (KDR). The existing key generation methods also lack the full use of the channel state information (CSI). We propose a key generation method based on multisubcarrier phase difference to expand the randomness source dimension, eliminate the phase bias, offset part of the noise influence, and set the threshold screening data to reduce the influence of measurement error. We further propose a key generation method based on resampling of kernel density estimation (KDE), which yields highly reciprocal randomness sources by resampling the results of KDE of phase difference values. To fill the metric gap of whether a method keeps low KDR while increasing the KGR, the evaluation metric of effective improvement ratio (EIR) is proposed. The two methods we proposed have a higher EIR than the method of using multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and increasing the quantization level, achieving the goal of increasing the KGR while maintaining the low KDR. The KGR can reach about 12146 bits/s, and the KDR is 1.83%. The keys obtained by both methods can effectively prevent passive eavesdropping and meet the randomness requirements.
Exploiting the reciprocity and randomness of the wireless channel for secret key generation (SKG) is a promising technique, which attracts great interests recently toward physical layer security. Although various methods have been developed for efficient SKG, the key disagreement rate (KDR) performance is still difficult to be ensured when the transmission channel is with severe interference and noise. To alleviate this problem, this paper presents an efficient channel information extraction algorithm based on extracting effective channel paths to reduce the KDR. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvement compared with the existing approaches.
With the continuous progress of communication technology, traditional encryption algorithms cannot meet the demands of modern wireless communication security. Secure communication based on physical layer encryption emerges as a solution. To meet the low Key Disagreement Rate (KDR) and high Key Generation Rate (KGR) requirements for physical layer key generation, this paper proposes two quantization algorithms, Improve-CQG and Interpolate-CQG, based on the Channel Quantization with Guard band (CQG) algorithm. The former divides the characteristic quantization into two phases: threshold filtering and guard band quantization, while the latter adds a step after these two phases: interpolation quantization. Compared to the CQG algorithm, the Improve-CQG algorithm enhances the granularity of filtered quantization values. The core concept of the Interpolate-CQG algorithm is to utilize threshold filtering and the rounded-off quantization values from the guard band quantization phase. The symbol information corresponding to these index values is replaced by a new interpolated symbol and inserted into the key by the agreed quantized coordinates. Simulation proves that the Interpolate-CQG is an effective quantization algorithm for the key generation with lower KDR and higher KGR than the Improve-CQA and Improve-CQG.