Secret Key Generation Based on Estimated Channel State Information for TDD-OFDM Systems Over Fading Channels

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems in cryptography is the generation of a common secret key between two legitimate parties to prevent eavesdropping. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic secret key generation (SKG) method for time division duplexing (TDD)-based orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over multipath fading channels. By exploring physical layer properties of the wireless medium, i.e., the reciprocity, randomness, and privacy features of the radio channel, an SKG method is proposed to maximize the number of secret bits given a target secret key disagreement ratio (SKDR). In the proposed SKG method, the phase information of the estimated channel state information (CSI) is distilled for SKG, and a special guard band (GB) scheme is designed to achieve the target SKDR with a small phase information loss. The proposed GB consists of both the amplitude GB (AGB) and phase GB (PGB), where the AGB is determined by the average signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), whereas the PGB adapts itself to the instantaneous SINR and thus incurs a smaller phase information loss in the higher SINR region. Analyses show that this GB scheme trades off a small loss of channel phase information for a better SKDR performance, and achieves a much larger number of quantization levels for a given SKDR due to the fact that the PGB decreases quickly as the SINR increases. Based on the performance analysis on the SKDR, the average secret key length, the phase information loss percentage (PILP), and the optimal GB and quantization level of the adaptive quantizor are derived for a given target SKDR. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme for TDD-OFDM systems over frequency-selective fading channels.