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Security and Privacy

A secret key establishment in frequency division duplex communication systems under active attacker

Ali M. Allam

Published Sep 1, 2018• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Most of the current research on generating a secret key from wireless fading channels relies on the channel reciprocity feature of the time division duplex link between legitimate entities so that they can acquire related information from the joint wireless connection. This paper investigates the challenge of generating a shared secret key in frequency division duplex communication systems, in which there is no reciprocity between the two nodes, in the presence of an active opponent. We suggest a key generation algorithm that depends on the product of two fading coefficients. We additionally look at the effects of an interfering adversary on the suggested key establishment scheme and solve the problem of evaluating the key rate for a scheme depending on virtual channel gain. We illustrate an adversary model using an optimal attacking strategy to minimize the rate of generating a shared secret key for our suggested algorithm. Additionally, we identify the suitable channel conditions for the non‐zero rate in the existence of an interfering adversary using simulation results.

DOI
10.1002/spy2.45

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Most of the current research on generating a secret key from wireless fading channels relies on the channel reciprocity feature of the time division duplex link between legitimate entities so that they can acquire related information from the joint wireless connection. This paper investigates the challenge of generating a shared secret key in frequency division duplex communication systems, in which there is no reciprocity between the two nodes, in the presence of an active opponent. We suggest a key generation algorithm that depends on the product of two fading coefficients. We additionally look at the effects of an interfering adversary on the suggested key establishment scheme and solve the problem of evaluating the key rate for a scheme depending on virtual channel gain. We illustrate an adversary model using an optimal attacking strategy to minimize the rate of generating a shared secret key for our suggested algorithm. Additionally, we identify the suitable channel conditions for the non‐zero rate in the existence of an interfering adversary using simulation results.
Most of current research on channel-based key generation focused on a time division duplex (TDD) system as the channel reciprocity factor applied directly to the generation of a secret key.However, most of commercial cellular systems rely on a frequency division duplex (FDD) mode.In this paper, we study the utilization of the uplink and downlink of FDD systems for the generation of common secret key between two users in the presents of inactive eavesdropper.The clue of our work is to explore the fading gain of the wireless channel between two users to generate a symmetric key.We develop the upper bound of the generation rate for shared key of the suggested mechanism and give numerical examples to show the performance of our suggested approach.
Summary Most recent research on channel‐based key generation oriented to time division duplex system because the channel reciprocity feature is applied directly for secret key generation. Most of commercial cellular systems depend on frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In this paper, we investigate the impact of uplink and downlink of FDD systems for the generation of shared secret keys between two parties in the presents of passive eavesdropper. In addition, we are considering improving the rate of the secret key for wireless communication in FDD mode. The main idea is to use the fading coefficient of the channels between the relay and other parties as an additional random common source for the secret key generation. Also, explore the using of channel estimation techniques to reduce the channel training sequence and study its effect on the generation of shared key for wireless communications in FDD mode. We derive the upper bound of the generated shared key rate for four scenarios and give numerical examples to reveal the performance of our suggested improvement approaches.
Physical layer security key generation exploits unpredictable features from wireless channels to achieve high security, which requires high reciprocity in order to set up symmetric keys between two users. This paper investigates enhancing the channel reciprocity using a loop-back scheme with multiple frequency bands in time-division duplex (TDD) communication systems, in order to mitigate the effect of hardware fingerprint interference and synchronization offset. The scheme is evaluated to be robust to passive eavesdropping and active Man-in-the-Middle attack through both theoretical analyses and practical measurements. A secret key generation protocol is subsequently designed. The performance of the proposed secret key generation method is then evaluated through both numerical simulation and experiments. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate non-reciprocity and outperforms the classical TDD scheme in both key disagreement rate and key generation rate.
Most of the existing work on key generation from wireless fading channels requires a direct wireless link between legitimate users so that they can obtain correlated observations from the common wireless link. This paper studies the key generation problem in the two-way relay channel, in which there is no direct channel between the key generating terminals. We propose an effective key generation scheme that achieves a substantially larger key rate than that of a direct channel mimic approach. Unlike existing schemes, there is no need for the key generating terminals to obtain correlated observations in our scheme. We also investigate the effects of an active attacker on the proposed key generation protocol. We characterize the optimal attacker's strategy that minimizes the key rate of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we establish the maximal attacker's power under which our scheme can still achieve a nonzero key rate.
Using the fading channel characteristics, as a randomness source, for the secret key generation earns significant attention because of it’s computational less power and low energy consumption. Current researches focus on point-to-point reciprocal-based key extraction from these randomness sources. Most practical communication situations are non-line of sight, so endpoints use a relaying channel to improve communication performance. Besides that, in the upcoming 5G systems, the full-duplex (FD) communications will be one of the main techniques, which will remove the advantage of using the reciprocal feature in the randomness source common observation. In this paper, we consider the challenge of generating a symmetric secret key between two legitimate parties in the relaying channel with FD capability. We suggest an efficient key extraction protocol that accomplished an acceptable shared secret key rate compared to the direct channel traditional approach. Unlike similar schemes, we provide full statistical analysis for the construction of randomness source from the relaying channel with FD capability. Additionally, we investigate the performance analysis of the suggested key agreement protocol. We also analyze the effect of the curious-but-honest relay and an eavesdropper on the proposed protocol.
Key establishment method based on channel reciprocity for time division duplex (TDD) system has earned a vital consideration in the majority of recent research.While most of the cellular systems rely on frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, especially the 5G network, which is not characterized by the channel reciprocity feature.This paper realizes the generation of a group secret key for multi-terminals communicated through a wireless network in FDD mode, by utilizing the nature of the physical layer for the wireless links between them.I consider a new group key generation approach, which using bitwise XOR with a modified pairwise secret key generation approach not based on the channel reciprocity feature.Precisely, this multi-node secret key agreement technique designed for three wireless network topologies: 1) the triangle topology, 2) the multi-terminal star topology, and 3) the multi-node chain topology.Three multi-node secret key agreement protocols suggest for these wireless communication topologies in FDD mode, respectively.I determine the upper bound for the generation rate of the secret key shared among multi-node, for the three multi-terminals topologies, and give numerical cases to expose the achievement of my offered technique.