Physical Layer Security against an Informed Eavesdropper in Underwater Acoustic Channels: Feature Extraction and Quantization

Pelekanakis, Konstantinos; Yildirim, Seckin Anil; Sklivanitis, Georgios; Petroccia, Roberto; Alves, João; Pados, Dimitris A.

doi:10.1109/ucomms50339.2021.9598102

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Channel impulse response features, such as its norm, a smooth sparseness measure, and the root-mean-square delay spread are exploited for key generation in [24], and demonstrated through experimental results. The works in [25], [26] extend the above by pursuing all steps of key generation including reconciliation and privacy amplification, showing acceptable bit disagreement ratios. The work in [27] investigates multipath-based features for secret key generation, with experimental results collected in a shallow-water experiment off the coast of Portugal.…”

Section: Literature Background and Contributionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Secret Key Generation From Route Propagation Delays for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Diamant

Tomasin

Ardizzon

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans.Inform.Forensic Secur.

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With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications and the recent adoption of standards in this field, it is becoming increasingly important to secure messages against eavesdroppers. In this paper, we focus on a physical-layer security solution to generate sequences of random bits (keys) between two devices (Alice and Bob) belonging to an underwater acoustic network (UWAN); the key must remain secret to a passive eavesdropper (Eve) not belonging to the UWAN. Our method is based on measuring the propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel over multiple hops of the UWAN: this harvests the randomness in the UWAN topology and turns the slow sound propagation in water into an advantage against eavesdropping. Our key generation protocol includes a route discovery handshake, whereby all UWAN devices at intermediate hops accumulate their message processing delays. This enables Alice and Bob to compute the actual propagation delays along each route and to map such information to a sequence of bits. Finally, from these bit sequences, Alice and Bob obtain a secret key. We analyze the performance of the protocol theoretically and assess it via extensive simulations and field experiments.

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Section: Literature Background and Contributionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Secret Key Generation From Route Propagation Delays for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Diamant

Tomasin

Ardizzon

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans.Inform.Forensic Secur.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Possible candidates are the number of channel taps, the average tap power, the root mean square (RMS) delay, and the smoothed received power, as discussed in [19,20]. Still, another possible set of channel features is reported instead in [16].…”

Section: System Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [16] and [17] a complete protocol for SKA in UWACs is proposed. Still, the proposed technique exploits a quantizer whose bin size is determined by the standard deviation of each feature, assuming an underlying Gaussian distribution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advantage-Distillation Strategies with Side Information for Underwater Acoustic Channels

Ardizzon,

Giurisato,

Tomasin

2024

Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023

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Many military and civil applications using underwater acoustic channels (UWACs) are paired with security services, providing, for instance, secrecy and authenticity to the communication. These mechanisms however often require periodically renewed symmetric keys among two communicating devices, namely Alice and Bob. To this end, secret keys can be agreed upon using the physicallayer communication channel, leveraging, in particular, the reciprocity and randomness of the UWAC to extract a common key that remains secret to an attacker (Eve). In this paper, we propose a novel solution for the advantagedistillation part of the secret key generation procedure. After channel probing, the advantage of distillation lets Alice and Bob extract a sequence of bits from their own (analog) measurements. We propose an asymmetric advantage-distillation protocol with two novel features: i) the quantizers used by Alice and Bob are derived maximizing the secret key capacity cooperating through a public channel and ii) Alice transmits a correction over a public authenticated side channel. Numerical results prove the effectiveness of our approach, showing that exchanging a few bits of information before information reconciliation allows extracting more secret bits from the channel.

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“…Yet, underwater acoustic channels offer specific characteristics that can be exploited for security. For instance, the channel's spatial dependency and the long propagation delay offer a diversity gain that enables the exchange of cryptographic keys [7][8][9] or authentication [10], e.g., through physical layer security (PLS) schemes; the complex mobility patterns of drifting nodes and the timevarying channel impulse response could help prevent interception attacks; and the strong attenuation leads to sparse logical topologies that increase security by splitting communications across disjoint wireless links [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical security for underwater acoustic networks: published results from the SAFE-UComm project

Casari,

Diamant,

Tomasin

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023

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The emergence of commercial underwater acoustic modems from different manufacturers and the promulgation of interoperability standards (e.g., JANUS) broadens the application scenarios of underwater acoustic telemetry and communications. At the same time, security concerns call for authentication and privacy-enforcing schemes. However, compute-or communication-intensive methods for terrestrial networks do not adapt well to bandwidthconstrained acoustic communications. In this context, we discuss the findings of the NATO SPS SAFE-UComm project, which involves research teams from Italy, Israel, Canada, and the UK. The project investigates and realizes practical security schemes that exploit the randomness of physical acoustic communication processes for security, and evaluates the potential of biomimicry and the capability of biomimetic signal detectors. After discussing the concept of SAFE-UComm, we survey its approaches to security through a number of results related to authentication, privacy, and biomimicry functions. Our results, based on several field experiments, show the feasibility of the project's design in relevant scenarios.

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Physical Layer Security against an Informed Eavesdropper in Underwater Acoustic Channels: Feature Extraction and Quantization

Cited by 17 publications

References 9 publications

Secret Key Generation From Route Propagation Delays for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Secret Key Generation From Route Propagation Delays for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Advantage-Distillation Strategies with Side Information for Underwater Acoustic Channels

Practical security for underwater acoustic networks: published results from the SAFE-UComm project

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