Intrinsic Information of Wideband Channels

Abstract

The ability to exchange secret messages and protect against security attacks becomes increasingly important for providing information superiority and confidentiality in modern information systems. These systems require shared secret keys, which can be generated from common random sources with known distributions. However, the assumption on the distribution of the sources may not hold in many realistic scenarios. In this paper, we establish a mathematical framework for secret-key generation using common unknown deterministic sources (UDSs). In particular, we propose a new information measure called intrinsic information to characterize the achievable length of the secret key that can be generated from a UDS. As a case study, we consider a wideband propagation medium in mobile wireless networks as a UDS and derive its intrinsic information as a function of various network parameters. Our results provide a non-Bayesian perspective for secret-key generation as well as practical implications of this new perspective.