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Journal of Applied Science and Information Technology

Secret Key Analysis of Random Pilot Full-Duplex Secret Key Generation in Static Environments

Roger Kwao Ahiadormey, Dennis Agyemanh Nana Gookyi, Michael Wilson, Paul Danquah

Published Sep 23, 2025• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This paper presents a random pilot full-duplex (FD) secret key generation scheme designed to enhance security in static wireless environments. In these environments, where inherent channel randomness is limited, efficiently extracting secret keys poses a significant challenge. The proposed scheme leverages the benefits of both FD operation and random pilot transmission to overcome this limitation and enhance the physical layer security. In this scheme, one of the FD nodes transmits random pilot signals, unknown to the eavesdropper, during the channel probing phase to artificially increase the shared randomness between the legitimate communicating nodes. By considering correlated eavesdropping, we derive the lower and upper bounds for the achievable secret key rate (SKR). The results reveal that the proposed FD scheme outperforms the HD scheme even in the presence of residual SI. Furthermore, the secret key rate can be improved by better SIC channel estimation and lower eavesdropper channel correlation.

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IEEE Transactions on Communications•Sep 5, 2018•19 citations
This paper presents a random pilot full-duplex (FD) secret key generation scheme designed to enhance security in static wireless environments. In these environments, where inherent channel randomness is limited, efficiently extracting secret keys poses a significant challenge. The proposed scheme leverages the benefits of both FD operation and random pilot transmission to overcome this limitation and enhance the physical layer security. In this scheme, one of the FD nodes transmits random pilot signals, unknown to the eavesdropper, during the channel probing phase to artificially increase the shared randomness between the legitimate communicating nodes. By considering correlated eavesdropping, we derive the lower and upper bounds for the achievable secret key rate (SKR). The results reveal that the proposed FD scheme outperforms the HD scheme even in the presence of residual SI. Furthermore, the secret key rate can be improved by better SIC channel estimation and lower eavesdropper channel correlation.
Using the fading channel characteristics, as a randomness source, for the secret key generation earns significant attention because of it’s computational less power and low energy consumption. Current researches focus on point-to-point reciprocal-based key extraction from these randomness sources. Most practical communication situations are non-line of sight, so endpoints use a relaying channel to improve communication performance. Besides that, in the upcoming 5G systems, the full-duplex (FD) communications will be one of the main techniques, which will remove the advantage of using the reciprocal feature in the randomness source common observation. In this paper, we consider the challenge of generating a symmetric secret key between two legitimate parties in the relaying channel with FD capability. We suggest an efficient key extraction protocol that accomplished an acceptable shared secret key rate compared to the direct channel traditional approach. Unlike similar schemes, we provide full statistical analysis for the construction of randomness source from the relaying channel with FD capability. Additionally, we investigate the performance analysis of the suggested key agreement protocol. We also analyze the effect of the curious-but-honest relay and an eavesdropper on the proposed protocol.
Using the fading channel characteristics, as a randomness source, for the secret key generation earns significant attention because of it’s computational less power and low energy consumption. Current researches focus on point-to-point reciprocal-based key extraction from these randomness sources. Most practical communication situations are non-line of sight, so endpoints use a relaying channel to improve communication performance. Besides that, in the upcoming 5G systems, the full-duplex (FD) communications will be one of the main techniques, which will remove the advantage of using the reciprocal feature in the randomness source common observation. In this paper, we consider the challenge of generating a symmetric secret key between two legitimate parties in the relaying channel with FD capability. We suggest an efficient key extraction protocol that accomplished an acceptable shared secret key rate compared to the direct channel traditional approach. Unlike similar schemes, we provide full statistical analysis for the construction of randomness source from the relaying channel with FD capability. Additionally, we investigate the performance analysis of the suggested key agreement protocol. We also analyze the effect of the curious-but-honest relay and an eavesdropper on the proposed protocol.
Physical layer secret key generation exploits the reciprocal channel randomness for key generation and has proven to be an effective addition security layer in wireless communications. However, static or scarcely random channels require artificially induced dynamics to improve the secrecy performance, e.g., using intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). One key challenge is that the induced random phase from IRS is also reflected in the direction to eavesdroppers (Eve). This leakage enables Eve nodes to estimate the legitimate channels and secret key via a globally known pilot sequence. To mitigate the secret key leakage issue, we propose to exploit random matrix theory to inform the design of a new physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG) algorithm. We prove that, when sending appropriate random Gaussian matrices, the singular values of Alice's and Bob's received signals follow a similar probability distribution. Leveraging these common singular values, we propose a random Gaussian matrix based PL-SKG (RGM PL-SKG), which avoids the usages of the globally known pilot and thereby prevents the aforementioned leakage issue. Our results show the following: (i) high noise resistance which leads to superior secret key rate (SKR) improvement (up to 300%) in low SNR regime, and (ii) general improved SKR performance against multiple colluded Eves. We believe our combination of random matrix theory and PL-SKG shows a new paradigm to secure the wireless communication channels.
In this paper, the impact of in-band full-duplex (IBFD) wireless communications on secret key generation via physical layer channel state information is investigated. A key generation strategy for IBFD wireless devices to increase the rate of generated secret keys over multipath fading channels is proposed. Conventionally, due to the half-duplex (HD) constraint on wireless transmissions, sensing simultaneous reciprocal channel measurements is not possible, which leads to a degraded key generation rate. However, with the advent of IBFD wireless devices, the legitimate nodes can sense the shared wireless link simultaneously at the possible cost of a self-interference (SI) channel estimation and some residual self-interference (RSI). As we demonstrate, with HD correlated observations the key rate is upper bounded by a constant, while with IBFD the key rate is only limited by the SI cancellation performance and is in general greater than that of its HD counterpart. Our analysis shows that with reasonable levels of SI cancellation, in the high SNR regime the key rate of IBFD is much higher, while in low SNRs, the HD system performs better. Finally, the key rate loss due to the overhead imposed by the SI channel estimation phase is discussed.
In the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT), encryption of confidential data by secret keys is vital. Secret-key generation from reciprocal wireless channels has received much attention in the research community in recent time. However, most implementations were restricted to half-duplex channel probing only. Communication setups with full-duplex (FD) capability enable new prospects for secret-key generation, since the inherent superposition of FD signals renders the acquisition of secret information more difficult for an eavesdropper. In this work, we demonstrate a practical testbed with FD capability in order to evaluate its advantages for secret-key agreement. We quantify the performance by computing correlation coefficients and mutual information of all channel estimates. Our work provides new insights into the opportunity of downgrading the capabilities of eavesdroppers by using full-duplex nodes.
A secret-key agreement for in-band full-duplex (FD) technology can be regarded as a valuable method for establishing security at the physical layer level. In this paper, we study an FD system model in conjunction with a secret-key agreement. The legitimate users interact through two-way channel probing and one-way reconciliation. We first introduce two complementary key generation models for FD and half-duplex (HD) settings, and compare their performances by introducing the key-reconciliation function. Furthermore, we study the impact of probing-reconciliation tradeoff and the role of a strong eavesdropper, and analyze the system performance in the high-signal-to-noise ratio regime. We show that under certain conditions, the FD mode negatively affects the capabilities of the eavesdropper and offers several advantages in terms of secret-key rate over the conventional HD setups. Our analysis reveals that the perfect self-interference cancellation is not necessary to obtain performance gains over the HD mode.