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IEEE Wireless Communications Letters

Pilot Randomization to Protect MIMO Secret Key Generation Systems Against Injection Attacks

Thuy M. Pham, Miroslav Mitev, Arsenia Chorti, Gerhard Paul Fettweis

Published Apr 20, 2023• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate the problem of secret key generation under an injection attack, which refers to tampering of pilot signals over the air so that part of the shared randomness observed at the legitimate parties is controlled by the adversary. It has been shown that to launch such an attack, an adversary only needs one extra antenna, compared to the legitimate parties, in a single input single output (SISO) network. In this letter, we generalize this result for the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) case. Furthermore, we propose pilot randomization as a means to protect against injection attacks by reducing them to jamming attacks that constitute a less serious threat. Finally, we derive a closed-form expression for the secret key rate of the investigated MIMO setting.

DOI
10.1109/lwc.2023.3268714

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In this letter, we investigate the problem of secret key generation under an injection attack, which refers to tampering of pilot signals over the air so that part of the shared randomness observed at the legitimate parties is controlled by the adversary. It has been shown that to launch such an attack, an adversary only needs one extra antenna, compared to the legitimate parties, in a single input single output (SISO) network. In this letter, we generalize this result for the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) case. Furthermore, we propose pilot randomization as a means to protect against injection attacks by reducing them to jamming attacks that constitute a less serious threat. Finally, we derive a closed-form expression for the secret key rate of the investigated MIMO setting.
Lightweight session key agreement schemes are expected to play a central role in building Internet of things (IoT) security in sixth-generation (6G) networks. A well-established approach deriving from the physical layer is a secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness (in the form of wireless fading coefficients). However, although practical, SKG schemes have been shown to be vulnerable to active attacks over the initial "advantage distillation" phase, throughout which estimates of the fading coefficients are obtained at the legitimate users. In fact, by injecting carefully designed signals during this phase, a man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack could manipulate and control part of the reconciled bits and thus render SKG vulnerable to brute force attacks. Alternatively, a denial of service attack can be mounted by a reactive jammer. In this paper, we investigate the impact of injection and jamming attacks during the advantage distillation in a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system. First, we show that a MiM attack can be mounted as long as the attacker has one extra antenna with respect to the legitimate users, and we propose a pilot randomization scheme that allows the legitimate users to successfully reduce the injection attack to a less harmful jamming attack. Secondly, by taking a game-theoretic approach we evaluate the optimal strategies available to the legitimate users in the presence of reactive jammers.
Extracting secret key from the common randomness of wireless channel has gained significant interest as a mechanism for providing secure point-to-point communications. Current works focus on the methods of exploiting channel characterizations based on Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), channel phase and Channel Impulse Response (CIR) under different propagation environments. However, when the channel fading is static or quasi-static, the secret key bits derived from the channel may be identical or nearly identical. In this paper, we propose a method to solve this problem in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems based on random beamforming. Compared with single antenna systems, MIMO systems offer more randomness available. Furthermore we consider the worst scenario where the eavesdropper Eve knows perfect knowledge of the legitimate channel. The quantization error probability at Eve is simulated to assess the security of the proposed method.
Wireless secret key generation (W-SKG) from shared randomness (e.g., from the wireless channel fading realizations), is a well established scheme that can be used for session key agreement. W-SKG approaches can be of particular interest in delay constrained wireless networks and notably in the context of ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in beyond fifth generation (B5G) systems. However W- SKG schemes are known to be malleable over the so called "advantage distillation" phase, during which observations of the shared randomness are obtained at the legitimate parties. As an example, an active attacker can act as a man-in- the-middle (MiM) by injecting pilot signals and/or can mount denial of service attacks (DoS) in the form of jamming. This paper investigates the impact of injection and reactive jamming attacks in W-SKG. First, it is demonstrated that injection attacks can be reduced to - potentially less harmful - jamming attacks by pilot randomization; a novel system design with randomized QPSK pilots is presented. Subsequently, the optimal jamming strategy is identified in a block fading additive white Gaussian noise (BF-AWGN) channel in the presence of a reactive jammer, using a game theoretic formulation. It is shown that the impact of a reactive jammer is far more severe than that of a simple proactive jammer.
Recently, shared secret key generation from wireless channel characteristics has attracted a lot of attention due to its low computational overhead. However, in a static environment, the secret key rate is relatively lower due to the lack of channel time-variation. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient PLKG scheme for static channels. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter attaches the information of the secret key into the downlink pilot signals to the legitimate receiver by the proposed secret precoding. At the receiving end, the legitimate receiver can directly observe the correct information of secret key from the public downlink pilot signals, while keeping perfect secrecy of the generated key against eavesdroppers. The key principle lies in that the information of the secret key is coded in the index of the non-activated MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) sub-channel. Consequently, only the legitimate receiver can accurately observe the value of the key information. For any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from the legitimate transmitter and receiver, it is proven that she cannot observe any key information from her received signals. Therefore, the key rate can be improved for the static channels by increasing the symbol rate of the pilot signals. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Much attention has recently been paid to methods of shared secret key generation that exploit the random characteristics of the amplitude and phase of a received signal and common channel symmetry in wireless communication systems. Protocols based on the phase of a received signal, due to the uniform distribution phase of fading channel, are suitable in both static and dynamic environments and, they have a key generation rate (KGR) higher than protocols based on received signal strength (RSS).In addition, previous works have generally focused on key generation protocol for single-antenna (SISO) systems but these have not produced a significant KGR. So in this paper to increase the randomness and key generation rate are used received signal phase estimations on multiple-antenna (MIMO) systems because they have the potential to present more random variables in key generation compared to SISO systems. The results of simulation show that the KGR of the proposed protocol is 4 and 9 times more than the KGR of a SISO system, when the numbers of transmitter and receiver antennas are the same and equal to 2 and 3, respectively. Also, the key generation rate will increase considerably, when to extract the secret key bits using multilevel quantization.
In this paper, the secret-key capacity is max-imized by optimizing the downlink training sequence in a time division duplexing (TDD) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) scenario. Both single-user and multiple user cases are considered. As opposed to previous works, the optimal training sequence and the related secret-key capacity is characterized in closed-form in the single-user case and the large antenna multiple-user case. Designs taking into account a constraint on the maximal number of pilots are also proposed. In the multiple-user case, both the max-min and the sum capacity criteria are considered, including potential user priorities. In the end, it is shown that massive MIMO boosts the secret-key capacity by leveraging: i) spatial dimensionality gain and ii) array gain. Moreover, in the large antenna case, the multiple-user capacity is obtained with no extra pilot overhead as compared to the single-user case.