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Electronics

A Study on Secret Key Rate in Wideband Rice Channel

Simone Del Prete, Franco Fuschini, Marina Barbiroli

Published Sep 2, 2022• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Standard cryptography is expected to poorly fit IoT applications and services, as IoT devices can hardly cope with the computational complexity often required to run encryption algorithms. In this framework, physical layer security is often claimed as an effective solution to enforce secrecy in IoT systems. It relies on wireless channel characteristics to provide a mechanism for secure communications, with or even without cryptography. Among the different possibilities, an interesting solution aims at exploiting the random-like nature of the wireless channel to let the legitimate users agree on a secret key, simultaneously limiting the eavesdropping threat thanks to the spatial decorrelation properties of the wireless channel. The actual reliability of the channel-based key generation process depends on several parameters, as the actual correlation between the channel samples gathered by the users and the noise always affecting the wireless communications. The sensitivity of the key generation process can be expressed by the secrecy key rate, which represents the maximum number of secret bits that can be achieved from each channel observation. In this work, the secrecy key rate value is computed by means of simulations carried out under different working conditions in order to investigate the impact of major channel parameters on the SKR values. In contrast to previous works, the secrecy key rate is computed under a line-of-sight wireless channel and considering different correlation levels between the legitimate users and the eavesdropper.

DOI
10.3390/electronics11172772

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Standard cryptography is expected to poorly fit IoT applications and services, as IoT devices can hardly cope with the computational complexity often required to run encryption algorithms. In this framework, physical layer security is often claimed as an effective solution to enforce secrecy in IoT systems. It relies on wireless channel characteristics to provide a mechanism for secure communications, with or even without cryptography. Among the different possibilities, an interesting solution aims at exploiting the random-like nature of the wireless channel to let the legitimate users agree on a secret key, simultaneously limiting the eavesdropping threat thanks to the spatial decorrelation properties of the wireless channel. The actual reliability of the channel-based key generation process depends on several parameters, as the actual correlation between the channel samples gathered by the users and the noise always affecting the wireless communications. The sensitivity of the key generation process can be expressed by the secrecy key rate, which represents the maximum number of secret bits that can be achieved from each channel observation. In this work, the secrecy key rate value is computed by means of simulations carried out under different working conditions in order to investigate the impact of major channel parameters on the SKR values. In contrast to previous works, the secrecy key rate is computed under a line-of-sight wireless channel and considering different correlation levels between the legitimate users and the eavesdropper.
With a massive amount of wireless sensor nodes in Internet of Things (IoT), it is difficult to establish key distribution and management mechanism for traditional encryption technology. Alternatively, the physical layer key generation technology is promising to implement in IoT, since it is based on the principle of information-theoretical security and has the advantage of low complexity. Most existing key generation schemes assume that eavesdropping channels are independent of legitimate channels, which may not be practical especially when eavesdropper nodes are near to legitimate nodes. However, this paper investigates key generation problems for a multi-relay wireless network in IoT, where the correlation between eavesdropping and legitimate channels are considered. Key generation schemes are proposed for both non-colluding and partially colluding eavesdroppers situations. The main idea is to divide the key agreement process into three phases: 1) we first generate a secret key by exploiting the difference between the random channels associated with each relay node and the eavesdropping channels; 2) another key is generated by integrating the residual common randomness associated with each relay pair; 3) the two keys generated in the first two phases are concatenated into the final key. The secrecy key performance of the proposed key generation schemes is also derived with closed-forms.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks generally contain resource-constrained devices that require an energy-efficient key generation procedure to producing secure keys at a faster rate. The physical characteristics of the wireless channel can be exploited to secure communication within IoT networks. In particular, secret keys can be generated by leveraging on the randomness of the wireless physical channel between two communicating parties. The conventional mechanism of generating keys at the physical layer, i.e., using channel probing, quantization, information reconciliation, and privacy amplification, may not be preferable for IoT devices. In addition, in some cases IoT devices may be deployed in static environments, wherein the channel coherence time is too high to generate keys at a faster rate and with the desired randomness. This study proposes a mapping table-based key distribution scheme for IoT environments, wherein multiple characteristics of the random channel are combined to improve not only the key generation rate (KGR) but also the key agreement rate (KAR) and bit error rate (BER). In the proposed scheme, both the channel magnitude and the phase are exploited in the key generation process. The proposed scheme is immune to channel estimation errors while providing sufficient randomness in the static environment. Additionally, the scheme is thoroughly investigated for different scenarios including the case of a smarter eavesdropper, which attempts to estimate the channel between the legitimate nodes. This case verifies the robustness of the proposed scheme in different settings and attack models.
The rapid technological advancements in wireless networks have resulted in tremendous increase in the number of connected user and machine-type wireless devices. Physical Layer Security (PLS) has a strong potential for providing security to wireless links in massively connected future wireless networks. The key-based PLS methods aim at generating secret key bits for data encryption/decryption at the legitimate communication nodes by exploiting the randomness inherent in wireless channels. This work proposes a novel secret key-bits extraction algorithm named Moving-Window Wrapped-Envelope Secret Key Generation (MWWE-SKG). The proposed algorithm uses first-order statistics from a sliding temporal window of channel samples to select the channel quantization interval for each window from circularly wrapped channel envelope samples. The differences in hardware noise conditions at the legitimate nodes lead to differences in the measurement of ideally reciprocal channels, which further leads to a mismatch in the generated secret key bits, whereas the channel statistics of the same links are more likely to remain unchanged for a reasonably large length of time window over the channel samples. An extensive analysis on the performance of the proposed algorithm is conducted, where the proposed algorithm is observed to provide a promising trade-off between the critical SKG performance metrics namely the Key Generation Rate (KGR), Bit Mismatch Probability (BMP), and the Key Randomness Property (KRP). Furthermore, a comparative performance analysis of the proposed algorithm with other notable techniques is also conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.
The billions of IoT devices in our home, healthcare, and industry rely on cryptographic keys for security. Constrained by computing and power resources, their keys are often pre-shared and rarely updated, creating a major vulnerability. The physical-layer wireless key generation can efficiently update keys but requires fluctuating wireless channel conditions, which, however, are scarce in static deployments. Here we show a novel wireless key generation that produces secure keys for static IoT without hardware assistance or secret exchange. We propose a randomness that is composed of received signal strengths and locally selected transmit power levels; the latter are independently selected at both communication pairs and are never exchanged, resulting in distinctive received signal strengths to ensure secrecy. We propose quantization and entropy balancing to boost generation efficiency and consistency. Experiments on an IoT testbed across multiple static scenarios achieve a fast key generation rate of 9.47 bits per second and a low key disagreement rate of 0.05, while defending against eavesdropping attacks. Xintao Huan and colleagues report a physical-layer wireless key generation scheme for static IoT scenarios. This scheme does not require hardware assistance or secret exchange and achieves fast key generation in static IoT while defending against eavesdropping attacks.
Wireless channel reciprocity can be successfully exploited as a common source of randomness for the generation of a secret key by two legitimate users willing to achieve confidential communications over a public channel. This paper presents an analytical framework to investigate the theoretical limits of secret-key generation when wireless multi-dimensional Gaussian channels are used as source of randomness. The intrinsic secrecy content of wide-sense stationary wireless channels in frequency, time and spatial domains is derived through asymptotic analysis as the number of observations in a given domain tends to infinity. Some significant case studies are presented where single and multiple antenna eavesdroppers are considered. In the numerical results, the role of signal-to-noise ratio, spatial correlation, frequency and time selectivity is investigated.
Modern networking technologies involve the interconnection of smart and intelligent physical objects to provide advanced services. These physical objects may be part of various network technologies like WLAN, wireless sensor network (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT), etc., and share data in wireless mode, which should be secured from threats. These physical devices possess many constraints like power, computational complexity and storage, and are required to have lightweight security algorithms. Traditionally, security is achieved by the higher layers of the communication model, which has high computational complexity and consumes more power. In this chapter, a secure-key-generation scheme from physical layer characteristics is introduced as a possible lightweight security alternative to traditional upper-layer security approaches. The proposed scheme is based on the wiretap-channel model and security is achieved by generating keys at both communicating ends independently, based on inherent common-channel characteristics like randomness. It is mainly based on the principle of spatial decorrelation and channel reciprocity for identical carrier frequency. There is no provision for sharing keys as in public-key cryptography, so physical-layer key generation is not vulnerable to threats like key leakage. The generated key at the transmitter encrypts plain text; the generated cipher is transmitted on the common channel and is decrypted at the receiver end using the key generated by the receiver. Key generation consists of fundamental blocks like channel probing and quantization followed by information reconciliation and privacy amplification. The physical-layer key generation is already a power-efficient security solution; this chapter aims to enhance this capacity further. This is done by introducing low-end signal conditioning in the channel-probing step using moving-window averaging. This solution not only improves system performance but also makes it suitable for limited- power applications. The performance of the key-generation system is characterised in terms of the bit-disagreement rate between the generated key sequences of communicating parties and the key randomness by means of the NIST statistical test suite.