Performance Evaluation of Keyless Authentication Based on Noisy Channel

Abstract

We consider a cryptographic scenario of two honest parties which share no secret key initially, but their final goal is to generate an information-theoretical secure key. In order to reach this goal they use assistance ofsome trusted center (as a satellite) that broadcasts a random string to legal users over noisy channels. An eavesdropper is able to receive also this string over another noisy channel. After an execution of the initialization phase, legal parties use discussion over noiseless public channels existing between them. The eavesdropper can intervene in the transmission and change the messages transmitted by legal parties. Thus, it is necessary to provide authentication of these messages. Otherwise the legal parties may agree a false key with the eavesdropper instead. In this paper we develop a concept of authentication based on noisy channels and present a performance evaluation of authentication procedures both for non-asymptotic and asymptotic cases.