High-Rate Secret Key Generation Using Physical Layer Security and Physical Unclonable Functions

Abstract

Physical layer security (PLS) can be adopted for efficient key sharing in secured wireless systems. The random nature of the wireless channel and channel reciprocity (CR) are the main pillars for realizing PLS techniques. However, for applications that involve air-to-air (A2A) transmission, such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, the channel does not generally have sufficient randomness to enable reliable key generation. Therefore, this work proposes a novel system design to mitigate the channel randomness constraint and enable high-rate secret key generation (SKG) process. The proposed system integrates physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and CR principle to securely exchange secret keys between two nodes. Moreover, an adaptive and controllable artificial fading (AF) level with interleaving is used to mitigate the impact of low randomness variations in the wireless channel. The proposed system can operate efficiently even when the channel is nearly flat or time invariant. Consequently, the time required for generating and sharing a key is significantly shorter than conventional techniques. We also propose a novel bit extraction scheme that reduces the number of overhead bits required to share the intermediate keys.The obtained Monte Carlo simulation results show that a key agreement can be reached at the first trial for moderate and high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), which is substantially faster than other PLS techniques. Moreover, the results show that inducing AF into static channels reduces the mismatch ratio between the generated secret sequences and degrades the eavesdropper's capability to predict the secret keys.

A Novel Approach for Secure Communication Networks: Dual Key Extraction-based NOMA Technique

“…In a study by T. Assaf et al [15], A fundamental aspect of this approach is utilizing physical unclonable functions (PUFs). PUFs are physical structures that produce random and unpredictable responses when exposed to specific stimuli.…”

Group Secret Key Generation Using Physical Layer Security for UAV Swarm Communications

“…Nevertheless, the air-to-air (A2A) channel entropy for UAV communications can be low, which can lead to a low key generation rate. To overcome such problems, Assaf et al [18] proposed using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) where the channel coefficients are used as the challenge for the PUF and PUF emulator (PUFe). Although the reliability of PUFs can deteriorate when experiencing a wide variation in temperature or supply voltage variations, new research results show promising results.…”

“…Based on the extensive literature search and to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is very little work that proposes GSK generation using PUFs, which are used to generate the pairwise keys between certain UAV pairs efficiently and securely. The main advantage of PUFs is their capability to operate efficiently in nearflat fading channels, which is not the case for most other existing algorithms [18]. However, configuring all UAVs with all PUFes can be prohibitively complex.…”

“…PUFs can be used to improve the characteristics of the pairwise keys generated using conventional PLS techniques. In such configurations, PLS can be used to generate an intermediate key, which is fed to the PUF that generates the final key [18]. Any two UAVs can generate a pairwise key if one of them has a PUF and the other has the corresponding emulator [29]- [32].…”

FPGA-Based PUF Designs: A Comprehensive Review and Comparative Analysis

“…It gives designers the ability to raise the security of their creations while retaining the adaptability and effectiveness needed for various applications. The generation of secret keys [11][12][13], the generation of random numbers [14][15][16][17], the protection of FPGA intellectual property [18,19], the identification of devices [20], chip authentication [8,17], key exchange/agreement protocols [8,[21][22][23], the prevention of counterfeiting [24], and IoT security [8,[22][23][24][25][26][27] are a few intriguing applications of FPGA-based PUFs.…”