This paper presents an autonomous perfectly secure low-bit-rate voice communication system (APS-VCS) based on the mixed-excitation linear prediction voice coder (MELPe), Vernam cipher, and sequential key distillation (SKD) protocol by public discussion. An authenticated public channel can be selected in a wide range, from internet connections to specially leased radio channels. We found the source of common randomness between the locally synthesized speech signal at the transmitter and the reconstructed speech signal at the receiver side. To avoid information leakage about open input speech, the SKD protocol is not executed on the actual transmitted speech signal but on artificially synthesized speech obtained by random selection of the linear spectral pairs (LSP) parameters of the speech production model. Experimental verification of the proposed system was performed on the Vlatacom Personal Crypto Platform for Voice encryption (vPCP-V). Empirical measurements show that with an adequate selection of system parameters for voice transmission of 1.2 kb/s, a secret key rate (KR) of up to 8.8 kb/s can be achieved, with a negligible leakage rate (LR) and bit error rate (BER) of order 10−3 for various communications channels, including GSM 3G and GSM VoLTE networks. At the same time, by ensuring perfect secrecy within symmetric encryption systems, it further highlights the importance of the symmetry principle in the field of information-theoretic security. To our knowledge, this is the first autonomous, perfectly secret system for low-bit-rate voice communication that does not require explicit prior generation and distribution of secret keys.
This paper presents an autonomous perfectly secure low-bit-rate voice communication system (APS-VCS) based on the mixed-excitation linear prediction voice coder (MELPe), Vernam cipher, and sequential key distillation (SKD) protocol by public discussion. An authenticated public channel can be selected in a wide range, from internet connections to specially leased radio channels. We found the source of common randomness between the locally synthesized speech signal at the transmitter and the reconstructed speech signal at the receiver side. To avoid information leakage about open input speech, the SKD protocol is not executed on the actual transmitted speech signal but on artificially synthesized speech obtained by random selection of the linear spectral pairs (LSP) parameters of the speech production model. Experimental verification of the proposed system was performed on the Vlatacom Personal Crypto Platform for Voice encryption (vPCP-V). Empirical measurements show that with an adequate selection of system parameters for voice transmission of 1.2 kb/s, a secret key rate (KR) of up to 8.8 kb/s can be achieved, with a negligible leakage rate (LR) and bit error rate (BER) of order 10−3 for various communications channels, including GSM 3G and GSM VoLTE networks. At the same time, by ensuring perfect secrecy within symmetric encryption systems, it further highlights the importance of the symmetry principle in the field of information-theoretic security. To our knowledge, this is the first autonomous, perfectly secret system for low-bit-rate voice communication that does not require explicit prior generation and distribution of secret keys.
This paper presents a system for secure digital voice signal transmission over the GSM mobile network (Global System for Mobile Communication). The cryptographic part of the system is based on Vernam cipher, which requires the same speed of generating secret symmetric keys as the basic information flow in the main channel. The system for generating and distributing secret keys for Vernam cipher is realized based on the correlation properties of the locally synthesized speech signal of the transmitter and the corresponding receiving speech signal. By applying the method of sequential distillation of secret keys (SKD) on the mentioned source of common randomness, the generation speed of up to 34 kb/s is ensured, which is more than enough to maintain the absolute secrecy of Vernam cipher. The price that needs to be paid is the necessity of having an additional authenticated public channel through which the SKD protocol is performed. The privacy amplification block, as a necessary part of the SKD protocol, was implemented using machine learning methods, in order to reliably estimate the conditional Renyi entropy of the second order. According to our knowledge, this is the first autonomous, perfectly secret system for voice transmission over the GSM network without explicit prior generation and distribution of secret keys.
Secure autonomous secret key distillation (SKD) systems traditionally depend on external common randomness (CR) sources, which often suffer from instability and limited reliability over long-term operation. In this work, we propose a novel SKD architecture that synthesizes CR by combining a keystream of a shared-key keystream generator KSG(KG) with locally generated binary Bernoulli noise. This construction emulates the statistical properties of the classical Maurer satellite scenario while enabling deterministic control over key parameters such as bit error rate, entropy, and leakage rate (LR). We derive a closed-form lower bound on the equivocation of the shared-secret key KG from the viewpoint of an adversary with access to public reconciliation data. This allows us to define an admissible operational region in which the system guarantees long-term secrecy through periodic key refreshes, without relying on advantage distillation. We integrate the Winnow protocol as the information reconciliation mechanism, optimized for short block lengths (N=8), and analyze its performance in terms of efficiency, LR, and final key disagreement rate (KDR). The proposed system operates in two modes: ideal secrecy, achieving secret key rates up to 22% under stringent constraints (KDR < 10−5, LR < 10−10), and perfect secrecy mode, which approximately halves the key rate. Notably, these security guarantees are achieved autonomously, without reliance on advantage distillation or external CR sources. Theoretical findings are further supported by experimental verification demonstrating the practical viability of the proposed system under realistic conditions. This study introduces, for the first time, an autonomous CR-based SKD system with provable security performance independent of communication channels or external randomness, thus enhancing the practical viability of secure key distribution schemes.
We propose a new high-speed secret key distillation system via public discussion based on the common randomness contained in the speech signal of the protocol participants. The proposed system consists of subsystems for quantization, advantage distillation, information reconciliation, an estimator for predicting conditional Renyi entropy, and universal hashing. The parameters of the system are optimized in order to achieve the maximum key distillation rate. By introducing a deep neural block for the prediction of conditional Renyi entropy, the lengths of the distilled secret keys are adaptively determined. The optimized system gives a key rate of over 11% and negligible information leakage to the eavesdropper, while NIST tests show the high cryptographic quality of produced secret keys. For a sampling rate of 16 kHz and quantization of input speech signals with 16 bits per sample, the system provides secret keys at a rate of 28 kb/s. This speed opens the possibility of wider application of this technology in the field of contemporary information security.
In order to cope with the problem of information leakage of existing secret-key agreement protocols under the environment of underwater acoustic channel (UAC), a covert secret-key agreement protocol called CSAP is proposed. In CSAP, the transmitter sends the uniformly distributed random messages to the receiver within a certain range of power constraints to ensure the reliability and the covertness of the protocol. The receiver calculates the estimated messages with Gibbs sampling according to the variance information of the underwater noise and uses the Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) test to extract the secret-key so as to reduce the uncertainty and the bit error rate (BER) of data transmission between two legitimate parties. The complexity of the CSAP protocol isO(n), wherendenotes the message length. The secrecy, covertness, and reliability of the CSAP protocol are proved by the information theory. The simulation results show that the CSAP protocol reduces the bit error rate (BER) by 28.88%, improves the secret-key generation rate by 25.70%, and decreases the communication cost by 11.32% on average compared to the existing protocol.
In this work, we study two problems in information-theoretic security. Firstly, we study a wireless network where two nodes want to securely exchange messages via an honest-but-curious bidirectional relay. There is no direct link between the user nodes, and all communication must take place through the relay. The relay behaves like a passive eavesdropper, but otherwise follows the protocol it is assigned. Our objective is to design a scheme where the user nodes can reliably exchange messages such that the relay gets no information about the individual messages. We first describe a perfectly secure scheme using nested lattices, and show that our scheme achieves secrecy regardless of the distribution of the additive noise, and even if this distribution is unknown to the user nodes. Our scheme is explicit, in the sense that for any pair of nested lattices, we give the distribution used for randomization at the encoders to guarantee security. We then give a strongly secure lattice coding scheme, and we characterize the performance of both these schemes in the presence of Gaussian noise. We then extend our perfectly-secure and strongly-secure schemes to obtain a protocol that guarantees end-to-end secrecy in a multichip line network. We also briefly study the robustness of our bidirectional relaying schemes to channel imperfections.
In the second problem, we consider the scenario where multiple terminals have access to private correlated Gaussian sources and a public noiseless communication channel. The objective is to generate a group secret key using their sources and public communication in a way that an eavesdropper having access to the public communication can obtain no information about the key. We give a nested lattice-based protocol for generating strongly secure secret keys from independent and identically distributed copies of the correlated random variables. Under certain assumptions on the joint distribution of the sources, we derive achievable secret key rates.
The tools used in designing protocols for both these problems are nested lattice codes, which have been widely used in several problems of communication and security. In this thesis, we also study lattice constructions that permit polynomial-time encoding and decoding. In this regard, we first look at a class of lattices obtained from low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, called Low-density Construction-A (LDA) lattices. We show that high-dimensional LDA lattices have several “goodness” properties that are desirable in many problems of communication and security. We also present a new class of low-complexity lattice coding schemes that achieve the capacity of the AWGN channel. Codes in this class are obtained by concatenating an inner Construction-A lattice code with an outer Reed-Solomon code or an expander code. We show that this class of codes can achieve the capacity of the AWGN channel with polynomial encoding and decoding complexities. Furthermore, the probability of error decays exponentially in the block length for a fixed transmission rate…
This work introduces security for unsourced random access (URA) via a physical-layer security approach. To achieve confidentiality, the proposed system opportunistically exploits intrinsic features of feedback-aided URA without altering its original structure or operational characteristics. As a result, the system preserves URA's efficiency, including low delay and minimal signaling overhead, while ensuring secure communication. To secure transmission, each user generates a secret key from a feedback signal broadcast by the BS in a previous transmission round, which depends on the BS-user channel and can thus be treated as private. Each user then encrypts its data using the secret key before transmission. Along with the encrypted data, only the parity bits of the LDPC-encoded key are transmitted, enabling secret key recovery at the legitimate receiver via Slepian-Wolf decoding with side information. We propose a receiver algorithm to recover both the encrypted data and the encoded secret key at the legitimate receiver. We further present a theoretical analysis to derive analytical error probabilities for both the legitimate receiver and the passive eavesdropper, as well as to quantify the additional load imposed by the security measures on the URA system. It is shown, based on both theoretical analysis and simulation results, that meaningful secrecy is achieved with only negligible extra overhead compared to the standard URA system.