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Entropy

Non-Reconciled Physical-Layer Keys-Assisted Secure Communication Scheme Based on Channel Correlation

Meng Wang, Kaizhi Huang, Zheng Wan, Xiaoli Sun, Liang Jin, Kai Zhao

Published Aug 22, 2022• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Physical-layer key generation technology requires information reconciliation to correct channel estimation errors between two legitimate users. However, sending the reconciliation signals over the public channel increases the communication overhead and the risk of information leakage. Aiming at the problem, integrated secure communication schemes using non-reconciled keys have attracted extensive attention. These schemes exploit channel coding to correct both inconsistent keys and transmission error bits. Meanwhile, more redundant code bits must be added to correct errors, which results in a lower secure transmission rate. To address the problem, we analyze the merit of channel correlation between non-reconciled key generation and secure transmission. Inspired by this, we propose a non-reconciled physical-layer keys-assisted secure communication scheme based on channel correlation. First of all, the signal frame is designed to make use of channel correlation between non-reconciled key generation and secure transmission. Based on the channel correlation, non-reconciled keys are then generated from the wireless channel to encrypt transmitted data. Moreover, an adaptive coding algorithm based on the equivalent channel is presented to encode the data bits before encryption, to guarantee reliable transmission. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed scheme in terms of low bit error ratio and high secure transmission rate.

DOI
10.3390/e24081167

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Physical-layer key generation technology requires information reconciliation to correct channel estimation errors between two legitimate users. However, sending the reconciliation signals over the public channel increases the communication overhead and the risk of information leakage. Aiming at the problem, integrated secure communication schemes using non-reconciled keys have attracted extensive attention. These schemes exploit channel coding to correct both inconsistent keys and transmission error bits. Meanwhile, more redundant code bits must be added to correct errors, which results in a lower secure transmission rate. To address the problem, we analyze the merit of channel correlation between non-reconciled key generation and secure transmission. Inspired by this, we propose a non-reconciled physical-layer keys-assisted secure communication scheme based on channel correlation. First of all, the signal frame is designed to make use of channel correlation between non-reconciled key generation and secure transmission. Based on the channel correlation, non-reconciled keys are then generated from the wireless channel to encrypt transmitted data. Moreover, an adaptive coding algorithm based on the equivalent channel is presented to encode the data bits before encryption, to guarantee reliable transmission. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed scheme in terms of low bit error ratio and high secure transmission rate.
The Non-Reconciled Keys-based One-Time Pad (NRK-OTP) secure transmission scheme has attracted widespread attention since it reduces communication cost and computational complexity caused by information reconciliation. However, this scheme utilizes quantization to convert the analog channel estimates into binary sequences, which results in channel estimation errors being amplified. To address the problem, this letter proposes a Non-Quantization Keys-based One-Time Pad (NQK-OTP) secure transmission scheme. First, the uniformly distributed keys are generated from the wireless channel without quantization. Novel encryption and decryption algorithms are then presented to encrypt and decrypt modulated signals via OTP. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can realize perfect secrecy and defend against symbol detection attacks. Compared with the NRK-OTP secure transmission scheme, the proposed scheme can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER).
Due to the channel estimation error, most of the physical layer secret key generation schemes need information reconciliation to correct error key bits, resulting in reduced efficiency. To solve the problem, this work proposes a novel secure communication scheme based on a equivalent interference channel. Different keys generated from imperfect channel state information are directly applied to signal scrambling and descrambling, which is equivalent to the process of a signal passing through an interference channel. Legitimate communication parties can reduce interference with the help of similar keys and channel coding without sending additional signals, while the eavesdropper channel is deteriorated due to the spatial decorrelation. For this kind of schemes, we first establish a discrete memoryless broadcast channel model to derive the expressions of bit error rate (BER), channel capacity, and security capacity for performance analysis. Simulation results verify the derivations that the proposed scheme achieves secure communication with a correlated eavesdropping channel and has a higher upper bound of transmission rate. Furthermore, we design a new metric to evaluate the efficiency and the result shows that the proposed scheme has superior performance on error reconciliation efficiency, despite its slight increase in BER.
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.
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.
Security of physical layer key generation is based on the randomness and reciprocity of wireless fading channel, which has attracted more and more attention in recent years. This paper proposes a rate adaptive key agreement scheme and utilizes the received signal strength (RSS) of the channel between two wireless devices to generate the key. In conventional information reconciliation process, the bit inconsistency rate is usually eliminated by using the filter method, which increases the possibility of exposing the generated key bit string. Building on the strengths of existing secret key extraction approaches, this paper develops a scheme that uses Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, one of forward error correction channel codes, for information reconciliation. Owing to strong error correction performance of RS codes, the proposed scheme can solve the problem of inconsistent key bit string in the process of channel sensing. At the same time, the composition of RS codes can help the scheme realize rate adaptation well due to the construction principle of error correction code, which can freely control the code rate and achieve the reconciliation method of different key bit string length. Through experiments, we find that when the number of inconsistent key bits is not greater than the maximum error correction number of RS codes, it can well meet the purpose of reconciliation.
Wireless secret key generation exploits unpredictable multi-path features from wireless channel to achieve high secure key bits. Most of the existing wireless secret key generation methods require information reconciliation process to correct discrepant key bits between the keying parties, which reveals information to the eavesdroppers and increases the system complexity. This paper introduces an integrated wireless secret key based transmission (WSKT) scheme for machine to machine (M2M) communications, using nonreconciled key bits generated from wireless channels without information reconciliation but sharing the error correction capability of channel coding. Polar code and stream encryption are employed to achieve secure communication. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed WSKT can achieve secure M2M communications which only causes a slight degradation on the system performance.