Secret Key Generation Protocol Research Articles

Novel Framework for Secure Handover Authentication Protocol for 5G Mobile Network

This paper presents a comprehensive solution for secret key generation and user authentication for 5G mobile networks. Our solution exploits the integration between physical layer and cryptographic security primitives. The presented secure secret key generation and authentication protocol based on exploiting physical layer attributes Angle of Arrival (AoA) and merges between cryptography and non-cryptography techniques (physical layer security) to obtain secure and fast handover in 5G mobile network. Huge increasing of the exchanging data and the lack of the current usable spectrum (several hundred megahertz and a few gigahertz) led to the adoption of millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G mobile networks. The opportunity of the un usable spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmwave) range from 30~300 GHz mandates the utility of small cells with base stations (BS) equipped with large numbers of antennas massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). This new architecture achieves better spectral and energy efficiencies, meanwhile, it also brings new challenges in security provisioning and new stringent latency requirements and potential risk of some security attacks. Impersonation and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks are examples of security vulnerabilities originated from the probable recurrent handovers and authentication processes in small cells architecture and Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). The assessment and simulation for the proposed protocol has been proved using AVISPA tool against (MitM) attack and MATLAB tool against impersonation attack. The proposed protocol has the ability to mitigate these attacks with no extra communications overhead, yet, with tolerable delay of estimation process.

Multi-Party Secret Key Generation Over Underwater Acoustic Channels

Concerning the problem of how to extract a highly confidential key for an arbitrary number of legitimate nodes under the circumstances of multipath and Doppler effects in underwater acoustic channels, we propose a multi-party secret key generation scheme over underwater acoustic channels against active attacks. In the proposed scheme, the $\alpha $ order Renyi entropy with multipath and Doppler effects is accurately depicted, and the uncertainty of the source sequence from the legitimate nodes and the eavesdropping node is also obtained. On this basis, a multi-party secret key generation protocol against active attacks is designed using bilinear mapping, which does not depend on the length and randomness of the random seed. Our results demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme in the metrics of the key leakage rate and the probability of a successful active attack.

Secret-Key Generation and Convexity of the Rate Region Using Infinite Compound Sources

In secret-key generation using a compound source, the actual statistics of the source are unknown to the participants. It is assumed rather that the actual source belongs to a set (compound set) which is known to the participants. The secret-key generation protocol should guarantee in this case reliability and security of the generated secret-key simultaneously for all elements of the compound set. In this paper, secret-key generation based on a three-party compound source is studied in which an eavesdropper’s side information is also taken into account and strong secrecy is guaranteed. At the same time, the public communication rate constraint between the legitimate users is part of the secret-key generation protocol. In this setting, the achievable secret-key rates for finite compound sources are first reformulated as a region of secret-key rate versus communication rate constraint pairs. It is shown that this region is in general convex, even if the compound set is infinite. Based on this, the secret-key capacity results are extended to be valid for arbitrary (possibly infinite) compound sources with a finite set of marginals. In this case, the secret-key capacity is completely characterized as a function of the forward communication rate parameter between the legitimate users.

An Investigation of Using Loop-Back Mechanism for Channel Reciprocity Enhancement in Secret Key Generation

Physical layer security key generation exploits unpredictable features from wireless channels to achieve high security, which requires high reciprocity in order to set up symmetric keys between two users. This paper investigates enhancing the channel reciprocity using a loop-back scheme with multiple frequency bands in time-division duplex (TDD) communication systems, in order to mitigate the effect of hardware fingerprint interference and synchronization offset. The scheme is evaluated to be robust to passive eavesdropping and active Man-in-the-Middle attack through both theoretical analyses and practical measurements. A secret key generation protocol is subsequently designed. The performance of the proposed secret key generation method is then evaluated through both numerical simulation and experiments. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate non-reciprocity and outperforms the classical TDD scheme in both key disagreement rate and key generation rate.

Secret Key Generation Protocol for Optical OFDM Systems in Indoor VLC Networks

Although the visible light communication (VLC) channel has superior security than radio frequency channels, its broadcast character makes VLC links vulnerable to eavesdropping. Therefore, VLC networks need to support security to protect the user's data against its eavesdroppers. Keyless security approaches have been proposed to provide security for VLC in the literature. Although these approaches support good security against eavesdroppers, they require complicated implementation. Algorithms of keys generation are essential to secure wireless links. Nevertheless, the common keys generation algorithms can be very complex and costly in many setups. They use up limited resources such as bandwidth. In this paper, we enhance the confidentiality of VLC networks by suggesting a new key extraction protocol for optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes in an indoor environment. We introduce to extract keys from the bipolar OFDM samples produced from optical OFDM schemes. We propose to allocate a portion of cyclic prefix samples placed in the area of low channel impact for keys extraction throughout session duration. The introduced protocol extracts keys for the medium access control (MAC) level and the physical level. It supports high physical-layer security as every OFDM signal frame is encrypted by a various key. Thus, the encryption at the MAC level can be switched off beyond any danger in security. This setup can improve the throughput of the system because it decreases the processing delay in the upper layer process. Also, the presented protocol supports zero bit mismatch rates with key extraction on the fly.

Secret key generation scheme from WiFi and LTE reference signals

Physical layer security has emerged as a promising approach to strengthen security of wireless communications. Particularly, extracting secret keys from channel randomness has attracted an increasing interest from both academic and industrial research groups. In this paper, we present a complete implantation of a secret key generation (SKG) protocol which is compliant with existing widespread Radio Access Technologies. This protocol performs the quantization of the channel state information, then information reconciliation and privacy amplification. We also propose an innovative algorithm to reduce the correlation between quantized channel coefficients that significantly improves the reliability and the resilience of the complete SKG scheme. Finally we assess the performance of our protocol by evaluating the quality of secret keys generated in various propagation environments from real single sense LTE signals, and real single and dual sense WiFi signals.

Robust secret key extraction from channel secondary random process

AbstractThe vast majority of existing secret key generation protocols exploit the inherent randomness of the wireless channel as a common source of randomness. However, independent noise added at the receivers of the legitimate nodes affects the reciprocity of the channel. In this paper, we propose a new simple technique to generate the secret key that mitigates the effect of noise. Specifically, we exploit the estimated channel to generate a secondary random process (SRP) that is common between the two legitimate nodes. We compare the estimated channel gain and phase to a preset threshold. The moving differences between the locations at which the estimated channel gain and phase exceed the threshold are the realization of our SRP. We study the properties of our generated SRP and derive a closed form expression for the probability mass function of the realizations of our SRP. We simulate an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system and show that our proposed technique provides a drastic improvement in the key bit mismatch rate between the legitimate nodes when compared with the techniques that exploit the estimated channel gain or phase directly. In addition to that, the secret key generated through our technique is longer than that generated by conventional techniques. Moreover, we compute the conditional probabilities used to estimate the secret key capacity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shared Secret Key Generation Protocol in Wireless Networks Based on the Phase of MIMO Fading Channels

Much attention has recently been paid to methods of shared secret key generation that exploit the random characteristics of a fading channel, such as amplitude and phase of a received signal. Proto...

Privacy Preserving Ranked Multi-Keyword Search for Multiple Data Owners in Cloud Computing

With the advent of cloud computing, it has become increasingly popular for data owners to outsource their data to public cloud servers while allowing data users to retrieve this data. For privacy concerns, secure searches over encrypted cloud data has motivated several research works under the single owner model. However, most cloud servers in practice do not just serve one owner; instead, they support multiple owners to share the benefits brought by cloud computing. In this paper, we propose schemes to deal with privacy preserving ranked multi-keyword search in a multi-owner model (PRMSM). To enable cloud servers to perform secure search without knowing the actual data of both keywords and trapdoors, we systematically construct a novel secure search protocol. To rank the search results and preserve the privacy of relevance scores between keywords and files, we propose a novel additive order and privacy preserving function family. To prevent the attackers from eavesdropping secret keys and pretending to be legal data users submitting searches, we propose a novel dynamic secret key generation protocol and a new data user authentication protocol. Furthermore, PRMSM supports efficient data user revocation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets confirm the efficacy and efficiency of PRMSM.

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical layer message authentication is also briefly introduced. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.

Information-Theoretically Secret Key Generation for Fading Wireless Channels

The multipath-rich wireless environment associated with typical wireless usage scenarios is characterized by a fading channel response that is time-varying, location-sensitive, and uniquely shared by a given transmitter-receiver pair. The complexity associated with a richly scattering environment implies that the short-term fading process is inherently hard to predict and best modeled stochastically, with rapid decorrelation properties in space, time, and frequency. In this paper, we demonstrate how the channel state between a wireless transmitter and receiver can be used as the basis for building practical secret key generation protocols between two entities. We begin by presenting a scheme based on level crossings of the fading process, which is well-suited for the Rayleigh and Rician fading models associated with a richly scattering environment. Our level crossing algorithm is simple, and incorporates a self-authenticating mechanism to prevent adversarial manipulation of message exchanges during the protocol. Since the level crossing algorithm is best suited for fading processes that exhibit symmetry in their underlying distribution, we present a second and more powerful approach that is suited for more general channel state distributions. This second approach is motivated by observations from quantizing jointly Gaussian processes, but exploits empirical measurements to set quantization boundaries and a heuristic log likelihood ratio estimate to achieve an improved secret key generation rate. We validate both proposed protocols through experimentations using a customized 802.11a platform, and show for the typical WiFi channel that reliable secret key establishment can be accomplished at rates on the order of 10 b/s.