A Novel Hybrid Protocol and Code Related Information Reconciliation Scheme for Physical Layer Secret Key Generation

Wireless networks are vulnerable to various attacks due to their open nature, making them susceptible to eavesdropping and other security threats. Eavesdropping attack takes place at the physical layer. Traditional wireless network security relies on cryptographic techniques to secure data transmissions. However, these techniques may not be suitable for all scenarios, especially in resource-constrained environments such as wireless sensor networks and adhoc networks. In these networks having limited power resources, generating cryptographic keys between mobile entities can be challenging. Also, the cryptographic keys are computationally complex and require key management infrastructure. Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) is an emerging solution to address these challenges. It establishes secure communication between two users by taking advantage of the wireless channel's inherent features. PLKG process involves channel probing, quantization, information reconciliation (IR) and privacy amplification to generate symmetric secret key. The researchers have used various PLKG techniques to get the secret key, sTop of Form till they face problems in the IR scheme to obtain symmetric keys between the users who share the same channel for communication. Both the code based and protocol based methods proposed in the literature have advantages and limitations related to their performance parameters such as information leakage, interaction delay and computation complexity. This research work proposes a novel IR mechanism that combines the protocol and code-based error correction methods to obtain reduced Bit Mismatch Rate (BMR), reduced information leakage, reduced interaction delay, and reduced computational time to enhance physical layer secret key's quality. In the proposed research work, the channel samples are generated using the Received Signal Strength (RSS) and Channel Impulse Response (CIR) parameters. These samples are quantized using Vector Quantization with Affinity Propagation Clustering (VQAPC) method to generate the preliminary key. The samples collected by the two users who wish to communicate, (for example Alice and Bob) will be different due to noise in the channel and hardware limitations. Hence their preliminary keys will be different. Removing this discrepancy between Bob's and Alice's initial keys, using novel Hybrid Protocol and Code related Information Reconciliation (HPC-IR) scheme to generate error corrected key, is the most important contribution of this research work. This key is further encoded by the MD5 hash function to generate a final secret key for exchanging information between two users over the wireless channel. It is observed that the proposed HPC-IR scheme achieves BMR of 19.4%, information leakage is 0.002, interaction delay is 0.001 seconds and computation time is 0.02 seconds

Authenticated secret key generation in delay-constrained wireless systems

With the emergence of 5G low-latency applications, such as haptics and V2X, low-complexity and low-latency security mechanisms are needed. Promising lightweight mechanisms include physical unclonable functions (PUF) and secret key generation (SKG) at the physical layer, as considered in this paper. In this framework, we propose (i) a zero round trip time (0-RTT) resumption authentication protocol combining PUF and SKG processes, (ii) a novel authenticated encryption (AE) using SKG, and (iii) pipelining of the AE SKG and the encrypted data transfer in order to reduce latency. Implementing the pipelining at PHY, we investigate a parallel SKG approach for multi-carrier systems, where a subset of the subcarriers are used for SKG and the rest for data transmission. The optimal solution to this PHY resource allocation problem is identified under security, power, and delay constraints, by formulating the subcarrier scheduling as a subset-sum 0−1 knapsack optimization. A heuristic algorithm of linear complexity is proposed and shown to incur negligible loss with respect to the optimal dynamic programming solution. All of the proposed mechanisms have the potential to pave the way for a new breed of latency aware security protocols

PCA based components selection criteria for computationally efficient Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) system

Data security is one of the prime concerns in wireless networks. PLKG has been emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional cryptographic techniques. PLKG is more computationally efficient than cryptography. Moreover, PLKG using Principal component analysis (PCA) as pre-processing may further save computations. This paper proposes three mechanisms to select components of PCA which are based on Information content, Mean and Histfit. Bit Disagreement Rate (BDR) is compared for each mechanism. Histfit based method is found to be best. Since only two components are supposed to be processed for key generation, it is computationally efficient/ power efficient too

PCA based components selection criteria for computationally efficient Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) system

Data security is one of the prime concerns in wireless networks. PLKG has been emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional cryptographic techniques. PLKG is more computationally efficient than cryptography. Moreover, PLKG using Principal component analysis (PCA) as pre-processing may further save computations. This paper proposes three mechanisms to select components of PCA which are based on Information content, Mean and Histfit. Bit Disagreement Rate (BDR) is compared for each mechanism. Histfit based method is found to be best. Since only two components are supposed to be processed for key generation, it is computationally efficient/ power efficient too