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Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR)

Using of Wavelets for Secret Key Generation: A Measurement Based Study

Ozan Alp Topal, Zekai Liang, Gerd Ascheid, Guido Dartmann, Güneş Karabulut Kurt

Published Nov 1, 2018• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For the physical layer (PHY) key generation, two distant nodes exploit the reciprocal channel coefficients as a shared secret. These nodes may obtain erroneous channel estimates and generate highly correlated but not identical secret keys. In this work, we analyze the key error rate (KER) performances when different wavelet families are utilized as a pre-processing step in PHY key generation. Measurement-based KER results show that selection of the wavelet can significantly change the performance.

DOI
10.1109/telfor.2018.8611930

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For the physical layer (PHY) key generation, two distant nodes exploit the reciprocal channel coefficients as a shared secret. These nodes may obtain erroneous channel estimates and generate highly correlated but not identical secret keys. In this work, we analyze the key error rate (KER) performances when different wavelet families are utilized as a pre-processing step in PHY key generation. Measurement-based KER results show that selection of the wavelet can significantly change the performance.
Channel gains are frequently used to obtain a secret key that can be used for encryption in physical layer security systems. However, the channel gains captured by the nodes may not always be the same due to channel estimation errors. This would result in a non-zero key error rate (KER). In this letter, we obtain theoretical expressions for KER in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. Tight KER approximations are provided based on Gauss-Laguerre quadrature. A measurement-based study is conducted by using software defined radio nodes to demonstrate the validity and the practicality of the provided results.
The reciprocity nature of a wireless channel has been leveraged to generate and establish secret keys between two devices communicating over the channel. This is typically done by having the two devices exchange probing signals to measure their channel state information (CSI), which each then uses to derive secret keys. While extensive research on secret key generation primarily focuses on theoretical and simulation analyses, the practical implementation and adoption of key generation encounter obstacles arising from hardware constraints and varying channel conditions. To address this research gap, we experimentally investigate the channel measurements by collecting CSI data using resource-constrained devices. Our experiments reveal a significant degradation in the correlation between the collected CSI from two low-cost devices limiting the key generation performance. Through our experimental investigations, we first demonstrate that wavelet coherence provides insights on the reciprocity of the channel measurements on both time and frequency. We then propose a new wavelet coherence-based CSI data reconstruction technique that uses wavelet coherence and time-lagged cross-correlation to reconstruct CSI data that is consistent between the two participating devices, resulting in significant improvement in the channel measurements. Additionally, we propose a secret-key generation scheme that exploits the proposed wavelet coherence-based CSI data reconstruction, yielding a significant reduction in the bit error rates and an increase in the key generation rates.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, wireless communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping, message modification, and node impersonation. Securing the wireless communication requires the shared secret keys between the communicating entities. Traditional security schemes rely on public key infrastructures and cryptographic algorithms to manage secret keys. Recently, many physical-layer-based methods have been proposed as alternative solutions for key generation in wireless networks. These methods exploit the inherent randomness of the wireless fading channel to generate secret keys while providing information-theoretical security without intensive cryptographic computations. This article provides an overview of the existing PHY-based key generation schemes exploiting the randomness of the wireless channels. Specifically, we first introduce the fundamental and general framework of the PHY-based key generation schemes and then categorize them into two classes: received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. Finally, we present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.
As an alternative and appealing approach to providing information security in wireless communication systems, secret key generation at physical layer has demonstrated its potential in terms of efficiency and reliability over traditional cryptographic methods. Without the necessity of a management centre for key distribution or reliance on computational complexity, physical layer key generation protocols enable two wireless entities to extract identical and dynamic keys from the randomness of the wireless channels associated with them.\nIn this thesis, the reliability of secret key generation at the physical layer is examined in practical wireless channels with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Theoretical analyses are provided to relate key match rate with channel's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), degrees of channel reciprocity, and iterations of information reconciliation.\nIn order to increase key match rate of physical layer secret key generation, improved schemes in the steps of channel estimation and sample quantization are proposed respectively. In the channel estimation step, multiple observations of the wireless channels are integrated with a linear processor to provide a synthesized and more accurate estimation of the wireless channel. In the sample quantization step, a magnitude based quantization method with two thresholds is proposed to quantize partial samples, where specific quantization areas are selected to reduce cross-over errors. Significant improvements in key match rate are proven for both schemes in theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. Key match rate can even achieve 100% in both schemes with the assistance of information reconciliation process.\nIn the end, a practical application of physical layer secret key generation is presented, where dynamic keys extracted from the wireless channels are utilized for securing secret data transmission and providing efficient access control.
Exploiting the inherent physical properties of wireless channels to complement or enhance the traditional security mechanisms has attracted prominent attention recently. However, the existing secret key generation schemes suffer from miscellaneous extracting procedure. Many PHY-layer authentication schemes assume that the knowledge of the shared key is preknown. In this paper, we propose PHY-layer secret key generation and authentication schemes for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In the secret key generation scheme, to simplify the extracting procedure, only one legitimate party is chosen to probe the channel and quantize the measurements to obtain the preliminary key. The preliminary key is masked by the channel-phase after the mapping and before equalization and distributed to the other party. The final shared key is used for the PHY-layer authentication scheme in which random signals and the shared key masked by the channel-phase are exchanged at the PHY-layer. Then, a binary hypothesis test is formulated for authentication. Simulation results show that the proposed secret key generation scheme outperforms the existing schemes. For the PHY-layer authentication scheme, it is immune to various passive and active attacks and a high successful authentication rate is acquired even at low signal-to-noise ratio region.
This manuscript aims to generate a secret key for a PHY layer to evaluate the channel characteristics in wireless communications. An algorithmic approach is adopted for multimedia encryption to generate a secret key between two entities communicating with each other in a real time simulation environment such as MATLAB. Two classes of PHY key generation schemes are analyzed for designing the algorithm such as received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. We present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.