Information-Theoretic Secure Key Sharing for Wide-Area Mobile Applications

Abstract

With the rapid growth of handheld devices in the internet of things (IoT) networks, mobile applications have become ubiquitous in everyday life. As technology is developed, so do also the risks and threats associated with it, especially in the forthcoming quantum era. Existing IoT networks, however, lack a quantum-resistant secret key sharing scheme to meet confidential message transmission demands in wide-area mobile applications. To address this issue, this article proposes a new scheme, channel reciprocity (CR) based quantum key distribution (QKD) CR-QKD, which accomplishes the goal of secret key sharing by combining emerging techniques of QKD and CR-based key generation (CRKG). Exploiting laws of quantum physics and properties of wireless channels, the proposed scheme is able to ensure the secrecy of the key, even against computationally unbounded adversaries. The basic mechanism is elaborated for a single-user case and it is extended into a multi-user case by redesigning a multi-user edge forwarding strategy. In addition, to make CR-QKD more practical, some enhancement strategies are studied to reduce the time delay and to improve the secret key generation rate in a secure manner. A prototype of CR-QKD is demonstrated in a metropolitan area network, where secret keys are shared between two remote IoT devices that are roughly fifteen kilometers apart from each other. The experimental results have verified that CR-QKD allows a secret key rate of 424 bits per second with a retransmission rate of 2.1%.

A coding scheme to force the eavesdropper falling in error avalanche

“…To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a coding scheme built upon error correction coding, aiming to increase the eavesdropper's decoding error rate and enhance key security. Literature indicates a substantial difference between eavesdropping and legitimate channels, with the average inconsistency rate for keys generated by legitimate channels being around 8%, while for keys generated by eavesdroppers, it is approximately 40% [4]. Leveraging this significant difference between eavesdropping and legitimate channels, this paper introduces a scheme based on polar codes [5].…”