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China Communications

Fast secret key generation based on dynamic private pilot from static wireless channels

Yu Huang, Liang Jin, Hongquan Wei, Zhong Zhou, Shengjun Zhang

Published Nov 1, 2018• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In static or quasi-static wireless channel environments, secret key generation (SKG) based on wireless channels is vulnerable to active attacks due to the openness and invariance of public pilot, especially man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where attacker acts as a transparent relay to manipulate channel measurements and derive the generated keys. In order to fight against this attack, a dynamic private pilot is designed, where both private pilot and secret key are derived from the characteristics of wireless channels and private to third party. In static or quasi-static environments, we use singular value decomposition techniques to reconstitute the wireless channels to improve the randomness of the wireless channels. Private pilot can encrypt and authenticate the wireless channels, which can make channel state information intercepted by MITM attacker reduced to zero and the SKG rate close to that without attacks. Results of analysis and simulation show the proposed SKG scheme can withdraw the MITM attacks.

DOI
10.1109/cc.2018.8543098

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In static or quasi-static wireless channel environments, secret key generation (SKG) based on wireless channels is vulnerable to active attacks due to the openness and invariance of public pilot, especially man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where attacker acts as a transparent relay to manipulate channel measurements and derive the generated keys. In order to fight against this attack, a dynamic private pilot is designed, where both private pilot and secret key are derived from the characteristics of wireless channels and private to third party. In static or quasi-static environments, we use singular value decomposition techniques to reconstitute the wireless channels to improve the randomness of the wireless channels. Private pilot can encrypt and authenticate the wireless channels, which can make channel state information intercepted by MITM attacker reduced to zero and the SKG rate close to that without attacks. Results of analysis and simulation show the proposed SKG scheme can withdraw the MITM attacks.
In this paper, we investigate the secret key generation (SKG) for static scenarios utilizing the pilot randomization method. In fact, the majority have studied SKG under dynamic scenarios in which a high secret key rate is achievable due to sufficiently high randomness. In this study, we instead consider the static scenario which, though important, is not well-studied. More specifically, we utilize the pilot randomization method, which is known to prevent injection attacks effectively, to randomize the associated channels. More importantly, we derive the secret key rate of the system and demonstrate that the secret key rate of a static system can increase significantly due to the added randomness. The proposed approach is demonstrated against known methods to show its effectiveness in increasing the secret key rate in static environments.
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.
Wireless secret key generation (W-SKG) from shared randomness (e.g., from the wireless channel fading realizations), is a well established scheme that can be used for session key agreement. W-SKG approaches can be of particular interest in delay constrained wireless networks and notably in the context of ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in beyond fifth generation (B5G) systems. However W- SKG schemes are known to be malleable over the so called "advantage distillation" phase, during which observations of the shared randomness are obtained at the legitimate parties. As an example, an active attacker can act as a man-in- the-middle (MiM) by injecting pilot signals and/or can mount denial of service attacks (DoS) in the form of jamming. This paper investigates the impact of injection and reactive jamming attacks in W-SKG. First, it is demonstrated that injection attacks can be reduced to - potentially less harmful - jamming attacks by pilot randomization; a novel system design with randomized QPSK pilots is presented. Subsequently, the optimal jamming strategy is identified in a block fading additive white Gaussian noise (BF-AWGN) channel in the presence of a reactive jammer, using a game theoretic formulation. It is shown that the impact of a reactive jammer is far more severe than that of a simple proactive jammer.
Most secret key generation (SKG) methods need channel estimation and provide insufficient performance especially in time division duplex single input single output (TDD-SISO) system and quasi-static channel scenario. This paper proposed a two-way SKG method which can completely avoid channel estimation and achieve higher SKG rate (SKGR). Firstly, the legitimate users mutually send their own random signal via the reciprocal channel. Then, the multiplication of local random signal and the received signal can be used as common randomness to generate keys. The theoretical and practical SKGRs of the three methods, namely wireless channel based, one-way randomness and two-way randomness, are derived and compared. Simulation and estimation results show that the proposed TW method acquires a better performance not only in theory but also in practice, and the practical SKGR of TW method is time-linear which provides a feasible scheme to significantly improve the SKGR for quasi-static channel scenario.
Physical layer secret key generation exploits the reciprocal channel randomness for key generation and has proven to be an effective addition security layer in wireless communications. However, static or scarcely random channels require artificially induced dynamics to improve the secrecy performance, e.g., using intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). One key challenge is that the induced random phase from IRS is also reflected in the direction to eavesdroppers (Eve). This leakage enables Eve nodes to estimate the legitimate channels and secret key via a globally known pilot sequence. To mitigate the secret key leakage issue, we propose to exploit random matrix theory to inform the design of a new physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG) algorithm. We prove that, when sending appropriate random Gaussian matrices, the singular values of Alice's and Bob's received signals follow a similar probability distribution. Leveraging these common singular values, we propose a random Gaussian matrix based PL-SKG (RGM PL-SKG), which avoids the usages of the globally known pilot and thereby prevents the aforementioned leakage issue. Our results show the following: (i) high noise resistance which leads to superior secret key rate (SKR) improvement (up to 300%) in low SNR regime, and (ii) general improved SKR performance against multiple colluded Eves. We believe our combination of random matrix theory and PL-SKG shows a new paradigm to secure the wireless communication channels.
This paper presents a random pilot full-duplex (FD) secret key generation scheme designed to enhance security in static wireless environments. In these environments, where inherent channel randomness is limited, efficiently extracting secret keys poses a significant challenge. The proposed scheme leverages the benefits of both FD operation and random pilot transmission to overcome this limitation and enhance the physical layer security. In this scheme, one of the FD nodes transmits random pilot signals, unknown to the eavesdropper, during the channel probing phase to artificially increase the shared randomness between the legitimate communicating nodes. By considering correlated eavesdropping, we derive the lower and upper bounds for the achievable secret key rate (SKR). The results reveal that the proposed FD scheme outperforms the HD scheme even in the presence of residual SI. Furthermore, the secret key rate can be improved by better SIC channel estimation and lower eavesdropper channel correlation.