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Chapman & Hall/CRC eBooks

Secret Key Generation under Active Attacks

Wenwen Tu, Lifeng Lai

Published Sep 1, 2017• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physical layer security, also called information theoretic security, is an emerging field which exploits physical layer properties of communication channels to secure future generations of communication systems. The approach to generating the secret key at the physical layer is proposed in the source model by the pioneer works. Different from the key generation process in the source model, the legitimate users typically observe no sources in advance, but they can obtain the sources via estimating the channel gain. This chapter discusses the problem of key generation under active attacks. It first reviews the basic scenarios for key generation in the presence of a passive adversary. Then, it considers the scenario where the attacker attacks the public discussion, reviews the relationship between the key rate obtained from the case with an active attacker with the corresponding key rate obtained from the passive case and discusses the condition which decides this relationship.

DOI
10.1201/9781315154503-8

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Physical layer security, also called information theoretic security, is an emerging field which exploits physical layer properties of communication channels to secure future generations of communication systems. The approach to generating the secret key at the physical layer is proposed in the source model by the pioneer works. Different from the key generation process in the source model, the legitimate users typically observe no sources in advance, but they can obtain the sources via estimating the channel gain. This chapter discusses the problem of key generation under active attacks. It first reviews the basic scenarios for key generation in the presence of a passive adversary. Then, it considers the scenario where the attacker attacks the public discussion, reviews the relationship between the key rate obtained from the case with an active attacker with the corresponding key rate obtained from the passive case and discusses the condition which decides this relationship.
This chapter introduces basic ideas of information-theoretic models for generating secret keys via public discussion, and reviews recent research on applying these ideas to wireless networks. In these applications, wireless channels between transceivers are exploited as random sources for key generation, and the keys generated in such a way can be shown to be provably secure with information-theoretic guarantees. Classic information-theoretic key generation models are first introduced and applications of these fundamental results to key generation over wireless channels are then discussed. Some new directions that generalize and improve the basic scenarios for key generation are described. These new directions include a joint source-channel approach for key generation, a relay-assisted key generation approach, and key generation under active attacks.
In this paper, the problem of key generation over an unauthenticated public channel in a network setup is considered. The considered model consists of four terminals: two legitimate terminals who need to share a key, a helper and an active adversary. The legitimate terminals and the helper are allowed to exchange messages over a public noiseless channel, to which the adversary has full access and may modify messages exchanged through this public channel. We investigate two types of keys: secret key (secure from the adversary only) and private key (secure from both the helper and the adversary). We characterize the relationship between the key rates in our model and the existing models with a passive adversary. We characterize conditions under which the generated key rates in this model are non-zero, and further provide an authentication scheme to show that key capacities, if are non-zero, are the same as those for the scenario with a passive adversary.
Physical layer key generation that exploits reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels has attracted considerable research attention in recent years. Although theoretical study has shown its potential to generate information- theoretic secure keys, great challenges remain when transforming the theory into practice. This article provides an overview of the physical layer key generation process and discusses its practical challenges. Different passive and active attacks are analyzed and evaluated through numerical study. A new key generation scheme using random probing signals, and combining user generated randomness and channel randomness, is introduced as a countermeasure against active attacks. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher security strength than existing schemes using constant probing signals under active attacks. Future research topics on physical layer key generation are discussed.
The use of wireless networks for communication has grown significantly in recent times, and continues to develop further. The broadcast nature of wireless communications makes them susceptible to a wide variety of security attacks. Unlike traditional solutions, which usually handle security at the application layer, the primary concern of this dissertation is to analyse and develop solutions for secure communication using channel coding techniques at the physical-layer. \nThe topic of physical layer authenticated encryption using high rate key generation through shared randomness is investigated in this work. First, a physical layer secret key generation scheme is discussed exploiting channel reciprocity in wireless systems. In order to address the susceptibility of this family of schemes to active attacks, a novel physical layer authentication encryption protocol is presented along with its extension to multi-node networks in the presence of active adversaries. Unlike previous work in the area of generating secret keys through shared randomness, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is semantically secure with respect to chosen plaintext and chosen cipher text attacks. \nSecondly, in order to increase the rate in bits per seconds at which agreed cryptographic keys are been generated, a multi-level quantization algorithm with public feedback is discussed. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is superior to direct information distillation approaches and can substantially increase the key generation rates even at low and medium SNRs. Furthermore, the employment of this low-overhead feedback at the information distillation process can largely simplify the information reconciliation process. \nThe proposed secret key generation schemes are tested for randomness such as required for cryptographic keys. The validation test is perfomed with the aid of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test suite. The P-values obtained in each of the test carried out indicates that the key sequence generated by our algorithm is random.
User authentication (UA) supports the receiver in deciding whether a message comes from either the claimed transmitter or an impersonating attacker. Information-theoretically secure authentication can be implemented by using either a secret (symmetric key) shared between both the legitimate users or the transmission medium over which the message is transmitted [physical-layer authentication (PLA)]. We analyze these solutions when the physical-layer channel is the unique randomness source for either generating the key or performing PLA. For the symmetric-key-based UA approach, we resort to a secret key agreement. Moreover, we also consider an asymmetric-key-based UA based on the public-key (proven to be semantically secure), where the channel is used as an entropy source at one device only. We define the secure authentication rate at which the probability that the UA attack succeeds goes to zero as the number of independent and identically distributed variables describing how the channel goes to infinity. Both passive and active attacks are considered, and by numerical results, we compare the various UA schemes.
Abstract: Physical layer key generation, leveraging the reciprocity and randomness of wireless fading channels, has garnered significant research interest in recent years. While theoretical studies have demonstrated its potential to generate informationtheoretically secure keys, challenges remain in translating theory into practice. This paper provides an overview of the physical layer key generation process and discusses its practical challenges. Various passive and active attacks are analyzed and evaluated through numerical studies. A new key generation scheme using random probing signals and combining usergenerated randomness with channel randomness is introduced to counteract active attacks. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher security strength than existing schemes using constant probing signals under active attacks. Secret-key generation relying on wireless channel reciprocity is an intriguing solution as it can be efficiently implemented at the physical layer of emerging wireless communication networks, while providing information-theoretic security guarantees. In this paper, we investigate and compare the secret-key capacity based on the sampling of the entire complex channel state information (CSI) or only its envelope, the received signal strength (RSS).