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Adaptive Quantization for Key Generation: Balancing Rate and Consistency

Ruikai Zhang, Sicheng Song, Shuhang He, Zhenxuan Fei, Zhenyu Xu, Linning Peng

Published Jul 12, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Wireless key generation systems often face challenges in achieving low Key Disagreement Rates (KDR) and Key Generation Rate (KGR) across diverse scenarios, limiting their reliability and efficiency. This paper presents a wireless key generation system based on the ESP32 platform, combining quantization methods and error correction codes to address these issues through comparative experiments. To obtain the ideal quantization order in different scenarios, we propose an adaptive quantization order selection model based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The results indicate that the performance of quantization methods is influenced by both the specific scenarios and the quantization order employed. Moreover, the combination of Joint Amplitude-Phase Equiprobable Quantization (JAPEQ) and Low-Density Parity-Check Codes (LDPC) outperforms other combinations in terms of KDR. Finally, our proposed adaptive quantization order selection model demonstrates ideal performance in terms of both key consistency and generation rate.

DOI
10.1109/icsip65915.2025.11171534

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Wireless key generation systems often face challenges in achieving low Key Disagreement Rates (KDR) and Key Generation Rate (KGR) across diverse scenarios, limiting their reliability and efficiency. This paper presents a wireless key generation system based on the ESP32 platform, combining quantization methods and error correction codes to address these issues through comparative experiments. To obtain the ideal quantization order in different scenarios, we propose an adaptive quantization order selection model based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The results indicate that the performance of quantization methods is influenced by both the specific scenarios and the quantization order employed. Moreover, the combination of Joint Amplitude-Phase Equiprobable Quantization (JAPEQ) and Low-Density Parity-Check Codes (LDPC) outperforms other combinations in terms of KDR. Finally, our proposed adaptive quantization order selection model demonstrates ideal performance in terms of both key consistency and generation rate.
Wireless channel key generation technology is an important mechanism to guarantee the security of wireless network, but influenced by the key length and the actual electromagnetic environment, wireless channel key generation technology is faced with the challenge of high-key generation rate (KGR) and low-key disagreement rate (KDR). The existing key generation methods also lack the full use of the channel state information (CSI). We propose a key generation method based on multisubcarrier phase difference to expand the randomness source dimension, eliminate the phase bias, offset part of the noise influence, and set the threshold screening data to reduce the influence of measurement error. We further propose a key generation method based on resampling of kernel density estimation (KDE), which yields highly reciprocal randomness sources by resampling the results of KDE of phase difference values. To fill the metric gap of whether a method keeps low KDR while increasing the KGR, the evaluation metric of effective improvement ratio (EIR) is proposed. The two methods we proposed have a higher EIR than the method of using multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and increasing the quantization level, achieving the goal of increasing the KGR while maintaining the low KDR. The KGR can reach about 12146 bits/s, and the KDR is 1.83%. The keys obtained by both methods can effectively prevent passive eavesdropping and meet the randomness requirements.
Physical layer key generation (PLKG) offers a lightweight and low-complexity key management solution for future emerging wireless communication networks. However, current PLKG schemes face challenges in effective integration with practical communication systems, hindering their practical deployment. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a key generation scheme integrated with the 5 G physical layer protocol, leveraging the Demodulation Reference Signal (DM-RS) to extract channel estimation for PLKG, enabling efficient key generation. Furthermore, a soft-decision quantization method based on Multibit Adaptive Quantization is proposed which makes key reconciliation input compatible with the soft-decision input requirements of the Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) decoder in 5G channel coding module. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme successfully integrates into the 5G standard communication framework while still maintaining favorable key disagreement rate (KDR) performance, the key reconciliation using keys derived by soft-decision quantization method can achieve better key agreement performance than using keys derived by binary quantization.
The necessity for secured communication devices that has limited computing power has encouraged the development of key generation scheme. The generation of a symmetric key scheme that utilizes randomness of wireless channels offers a most promising solution as a result of the easy distribution of secret key mechanisms. In the last few years, various schemes have been proposed, but there are trade-offs between the performance parameters used. The expected parameters are the low Key Disagreement Rate (KDR), the high Key Generation Rate (KGR), and the fulfillment of standard of randomness. In this paper, we propose the use of a combination of pre-processing methods with multilevel lossy quantization to overcome the trade-off of performance parameters of the Secret Key Generation (SKG) scheme. Pre-process method used to improve reciprocity so as to reduce KDR, whereas multilevel quantization is used to improve the KGR. We use Kalman as the pre-processing method and Adaptive Quantization, Modified Multi-Bit (MMB), and 2-ary Quantization as the multilevel lossy quantization. Testing is conducted by comparing the performance between direct quantization with the addition of the pre-processing method in various multilevel lossy quantization schemes. The test results show that the use of Kalman as pre-processing methods and multilevel lossy quantization can overcome the trade-off performance parameters by reducing KDR and increasing KGR, with the best performance, was obtained when we use adaptive quantization. The resulting secret key has also fulfilled 6 random tests with p values greater than 0.01.
The problem of key reconciliation based on Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes and Slepian-Wolf coding for physical layer key generation is investigated.When using the channel-state-information (CSI) of a reciprocal wireless channel for key generation between two legitimate users, independent noise components, quantization, and synchronization errors at the end nodes give rise to key differences that need to be corrected by sending side information.We provide a comparison of three different quantization schemes in terms of key disagreement rate and output probability distributions and present the loglikelihood formulations required by a soft decision LDPC decoder to perform key reconciliation, for the investigated quantization methods.
The Secret Key Generation (SKG) scheme that exploits the reciprocity and uniqueness of wireless channel between two users plays a significant part in a new increasing distributed security system. The scheme performance can be distinguished based on the low value of Key disagreement Rate (KDR), the high value of Key Generation Rate (KGR), as well as the fulfillment of the NIST randomness standard. The previous SKG scheme has a high KDR due to a direct quantization of a measurement result of the Received Signal Strength (RSS). To overcome the above issue, we conduct a pre-processing of measurement result before quantization with the Kalman method. The pre-process is carried out to improve the channel reciprocity between two legitimate users with the objective to reduce the bit mismatch. Through an experiment, we propose a new quantization scheme called a Modified Multi-Bit (MMB) that uses a multi-bit system on every level of quantization. The test results show that the proposed combination of preprocessing and the MMB scheme has a better performance compared to the existing schemes in terms of KDR and KGR. The Secret Key generated by our scheme also fulfills the NIST randomness standard.
Wireless secret key generation has emerged as a promising technique for Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems to establish shared encryption keys between the server and legitimate mobile user. This article focuses on the use of multidomain joint information to achieve a high key generation rate (KGR) and the implementation of a reliable, low-complexity secret key generation mechanism for distributed antenna systems (DAS) with orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We present a space-time-frequency channel state information (CSI)-based key generation scheme based on a two-step approach of adaptive link selection and stepwise decorrelation algorithms. The performance is evaluated in terms of KGR, key disagreement rate (KDR), randomness, and computational complexity by using both a standardized channel model and real-world measurements. Numerical results show that our proposed low-complexity algorithms effectively utilize the space-time-frequency CSI to multiply the KGR in both indoor and outdoor environments. Through adaptive link selection in DAS, the KDR is maintained within a correctable range, thereby ensuring the validity of generated keys in dynamic environments. Further applying stepwise decorrelation reduces the computational complexity by more than half while satisfying all eight key generation randomness tests in the NIST test suite.