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Security and Safety

A physical layer secret key consistency enhancement scheme using constellation decision information

Zheyuan Deng, Liang Jin, Xiaoyan Hu, Zhong Zhou, Yangming Lou, Ge Niu

Published Nov 20, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Secret key generation based on a wireless channel (WC-SKG) is a promising solution to address the security issues in wireless communication. However, the consistency of channel estimation between two legal communication nodes in WC-SKG is often poor due to the receiver noise, signal power, etc., leading to a low secret key generation rate (SKGR). Although there are several denoising algorithms such as orthogonal transformation to address this issue, existing schemes overlook the fact that data symbols are also affected by the channel. This results in existing schemes only using the pilot symbols for channel estimation and not fully utilizing the received signal power of the WC-SKG. To address this issue, we propose a consistency enhancement algorithm based on constellation decision information (CEA-CDI), which utilizes both pilot symbols and soft decision information of data symbols to improve SKGR. Monte Carlo simulation and numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve performance by approximately 16 dB compared to initial channel estimation.

DOI
10.1051/sands/2023033

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Secret key generation based on a wireless channel (WC-SKG) is a promising solution to address the security issues in wireless communication. However, the consistency of channel estimation between two legal communication nodes in WC-SKG is often poor due to the receiver noise, signal power, etc., leading to a low secret key generation rate (SKGR). Although there are several denoising algorithms such as orthogonal transformation to address this issue, existing schemes overlook the fact that data symbols are also affected by the channel. This results in existing schemes only using the pilot symbols for channel estimation and not fully utilizing the received signal power of the WC-SKG. To address this issue, we propose a consistency enhancement algorithm based on constellation decision information (CEA-CDI), which utilizes both pilot symbols and soft decision information of data symbols to improve SKGR. Monte Carlo simulation and numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve performance by approximately 16 dB compared to initial channel estimation.
With the rapid advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), ensuring the security of communication links among UAVs has become crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel physical layer key generation scheme based on channel codeword reconstruction. In UAV communications, the high mobility of aerial nodes leads to short channel coherence time, which together with noise causes inevitable channel estimation errors. These errors significantly degrades the performance of wireless channel-based key generation. Therefore, we propose a codeword construction algorithm that achieves a polarization characteristic, which effectively segregates reliable keys from unreliable ones. Compared to the existing quantization-based key generation scheme, our approach maximize the utilization of raw channel information and employ soft-decision decoding to generate key. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces the key disagreement rate for legitimate users and increases the number of consistently generated keys. Furthermore, our method ensures a lower key consistency rate for eavesdropper, which guarantees system security.
In this work we investigate the problem of secret key generation (SKG) between two communicating wireless devices, according to the physical-layer security paradigm. We propose a general framework for any communication channel or waveform. In details, we study a filterbank-based method, which allows the generation of secret security keys from a wideband radio channel, independently from the baseband modem implementation. We believe that channel awareness is of utmost importance to understand the applicability of SKG methods, i.e., knowing their secret bit-rate under different channel scenarios. For that purpose, we investigate the SKG performance by means of Monte Carlo simulations that collect radio channel statistics and obtain the SKG performance through mutual information numerical estimation.
Physical layer security (PLS) of wireless communications is becoming increasingly significant with the advent of 6G. The reconciliation of channel-based secret key generation (SKG) methods is necessary to avoid inconsistencies after key generation, resulting in increased communication overhead, leakage of key information, and reduced security performance. This paper proposes a fuzzy secret key generation (FSKG) method that does not require the legitimate user to perform a consistency check after fuzzy extraction of the phase, which is used directly to encrypt the constellation rotation of the key. The proposed scheme allows users to code-decode the key bits to reduce the transmission error probability and improve the key consistency, and the simulation results prove that the proposed FSKG scheme outperforms traditional SKG schemes like CQA and CQG. The simulation results also indicate that the best secure key rate can be achieved by applying PSK modulation.
Physical-layer secret key generation (SKG) provides high-level security for data encryption in wireless communications, using the shared unique channel state information between legal partners. Most of SKG schemes focused on only SKG itself, while the combination of SKG and encrypted data transmission using the generated secret keys needs to be explored. Here, we propose and demonstrate a secure wireless communication scheme, where SKG and encrypted data communication are integrated together. For SKG, the randomness originated from the input data is utilized to increase the effective key generation rate (KGR) up to 20.8Kb/s when the input data rate is 250Kb/s. Afterwards, the data is encrypted using the generated secret keys and advanced encryption standard (AES). The feasibility and robustness of the integrated system have been verified by the experimental results. Compared with the system where SKG and encrypted data communication are separated, the time required to transfer the same amount of data will be reduced by 48.04%.
Exploiting the reciprocity and randomness of the wireless channel for secret key generation (SKG) is a promising technique, which attracts great interests recently toward physical layer security. Although various methods have been developed for efficient SKG, the key disagreement rate (KDR) performance is still difficult to be ensured when the transmission channel is with severe interference and noise. To alleviate this problem, this paper presents an efficient channel information extraction algorithm based on extracting effective channel paths to reduce the KDR. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvement compared with the existing approaches.
Although physical-layer secret key generation (SKG) techniques generally show promising performance in many wireless communication systems, they may not be applicable to satellite systems mainly because of the long coherence time. For the satellite systems, we need a technique to introduce randomness and it should be resistant to long round-trip delays. To achieve this, this paper proposes a novel SKG scheme using the information contained in the transmitted data, which can act as a random signal, instead of additionally generating random probing signals. The proposed method effectively increases secret key rates, without security risk. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme enhances the data transmission efficiency while maintaining lower secret key disagreement rate.