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IEEE Access

Secret Key Generation With Multiantenna Relays

Magnus Sandell

Published Jan 1, 2023• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

One effective way of generating and distributing secret keys for secure communication is to exploit the randomness of wireless channels. Since a potential eavesdropper has a different propagation channel than two legitimate users, it can be used to generate unique and secure keys. If the two devices are far apart, a relay can aid the process. This paper presents a novel precoding scheme for the relay which delivers the keys directly and with very little processing required at the end devices. We also compare scalar and vector quantisation and show that a tree-based vector quantisation scheme has better performance than the former but much lower complexity than the latter.

DOI
10.1109/access.2023.3239299

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One effective way of generating and distributing secret keys for secure communication is to exploit the randomness of wireless channels. Since a potential eavesdropper has a different propagation channel than two legitimate users, it can be used to generate unique and secure keys. If the two devices are far apart, a relay can aid the process. This paper presents a novel precoding scheme for the relay which delivers the keys directly and with very little processing required at the end devices. We also compare scalar and vector quantisation and show that a tree-based vector quantisation scheme has better performance than the former but much lower complexity than the latter.
One effective way of generating and distributing secret keys for secure communication is to exploit the randomness of wireless channels. Since a potential eavesdropper has a different propagation channel than two legitimate users, it can be used to generate unique and secure keys. After reciprocal channel sounding, a frequency-selective channel can be quantised to produce the secret keys. Due to different sampling times at the two legitimate devices, the phase of the frequency response will not be equal and hence compromise the secret key generation. In this paper, we show how to overcome this problem and verify the results through both simulations and hardware measurements. We also compare scalar and vector quantisation, and show how the latter can be designed to be robust to synchronisation offsets.
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.
The generation of symmetric cryptographic keys based on reciprocal channel properties has evolved as a promising approach in recent years, especially for devices with only little computational power. Different schemes individually addressing constraints from special setups have been proposed, but most schemes generally suffer from bad performance in case of (nearly) static scenarios. Addressing this dilemma, we present a novel approach for physical layer based key generation with two static users supported by a third party. In contrast to other solutions, this approach does not rely on special hardware like multiple antennas and does not let the third party know anything about the secret key, as the helper is potentially not fully trusted. The scheme does not evade to other diversity domains, but still exploits temporal and spatial diversity. We present thorough performance and security analysis, also taking a passive attacker into account.
Secure communication in a wireless environment is very vital, and cryptographic schemes are usually used to ensure it. Secret keys that are unknown to the tappers are needed by cryptographic schemes to secure communication between two legitimate users. In recent years the secret key generation scheme that utilizes a wireless channel as a secret key generation source has become a very interesting and promising topic. The main problem of this scheme is the high wireless channel mismatch between two users due to nonsimultaneous measurements and noise from the device. In this paper, we proposed a secret key generation scheme that uses the Savitzky-Golay filter method to reduce the high mismatch wireless channel. The scheme that was built was also equipped with a multibit quantization method to increase the speed of generation of secret keys. The results of our tests show a decrease in wireless channel mismatch between two users and an increase in the speed of generation of secret keys.
Most of the existing work on key generation from wireless fading channels requires a direct wireless link between legitimate users so that they can obtain correlated observations from the common wireless link. This paper studies the key generation problem in the two-way relay channel, in which there is no direct channel between the key generating terminals. We propose an effective key generation scheme that achieves a substantially larger key rate than that of a direct channel mimic approach. Unlike existing schemes, there is no need for the key generating terminals to obtain correlated observations in our scheme. We also investigate the effects of an active attacker on the proposed key generation protocol. We characterize the optimal attacker's strategy that minimizes the key rate of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we establish the maximal attacker's power under which our scheme can still achieve a nonzero key rate.
Most of the existing work on key generation from wireless fading channels requires a direct wireless link between legitimate users so that they can obtain correlated observations from the common wireless link. This paper studies the key generation problem in the two-way relay channel, in which there is no direct channel between the key generating terminals. We propose an effective key generation scheme that achieves a substantially larger key rate than that of a direct channel mimic approach. Unlike existing schemes, there is no need for the key generating terminals to obtain correlated observations in our scheme. We then extend our study to the case of a relay with multiple antennas. For this scenario, we derive the optimal power allocation at the relay that maximizes the key rate achieved using our protocol.