A Practical Secret Key Generation Scheme Based on Wireless Channel Characteristics for 5G Networks

Abstract

Secret key generation based on channel characteristics is an effective physical-layer security method for 5G wireless networks. The issues of how to ensure the high key generation rate and correlation of the secret key under active attack are needed to be addressed. In this paper, a new practical secret key generation scheme with high rate and correlation is proposed. In our proposed scheme, Alice and Bob transmit independent random sequences instead of known training sequences or probing signals; neither Alice nor Bob can decode these random sequences or estimate the channel. User's random sequences together with the channel effects are used as common random source to generate the secret key. With this solution, legitimate users are able to share secret keys with sufficient length and high security under active attack. We evaluate the proposed scheme through both analytic and simulation studies. The results show that our proposed scheme achieves high key generation rate and key security, and is suitable for 5G wireless networks with resource-constrained devices.

Key Generation for Internet of Things: A Contemporary Survey

“…Recently, researchers found that CSI can counter this attack because it can extract channel information from different subcarriers and attacker's movement has different impact on different subcarriers [72,136]. To counter predictable channel attack for RSSI-based key generation system, researchers have proposed a variety of methods by introducing different kinds of randomness into the channels, such as using multiple attennas [104], rotating attenna [127], transmitting random signals [128], and other schemes [15,32,34,43,77].…”