We consider secret key generation for a "pairwise independent network" model in which every pair of terminals observes correlated sources that are independent of sources observed by all other pairs of terminals. The terminals are then allowed to communicate publicly with all such communication being observed by all the terminals. The objective is to generate a secret key shared by a given subset of terminals at the largest rate possible, with the cooperation of any remaining terminals. Secrecy is required from an eavesdropper that has access to the public interterminal communication. A (single-letter) formula for secret key capacity brings out a natural connection between the problem of secret key generation and a combinatorial problem of maximal packing of Steiner trees in an associated multigraph. An explicit algorithm is proposed for secret key generation based on a maximal packing of Steiner trees in a multigraph; the corresponding maximum rate of Steiner tree packing is thus a lower bound for the secret key capacity. When only two of the terminals or when all the terminals seek to share a secret key, the mentioned algorithm achieves secret key capacity in which case the bound is tight.
A source model of key sharing between three users is considered in which each pair of them wishes to agree on a secret key hidden from the remaining user. There are rate-limited public channels for communications between the users. We give an inner bound on the secret key capacity region in this framework. Moreover, we investigate a practical setup in which localization information of the users as the correlated observations are exploited to share pairwise keys between the users. The inner and outer bounds of the key capacity region are analyzed in this setup for the case of i.i.d. Gaussian ob…
This paper considers the problem of pairwise key agreement without public communication between three users connected through a generalized multiple access channel (MAC). While two users control the channel inputs, all three users observe noisy outputs from the channel and each pair of users wishes to agree on a secret key hidden from the remaining user. We first develop a "pre-generated" key-agreement scheme based on secrecy codes for the generalized MAC, in which the channel is only used to distribute pre-generated secret keys. We then extend this scheme to include an additional layer of rat…
For the multiterminal secret key agreement problem, new single-letter lower bounds are obtained on the public discussion rate required to achieve any given secret key rate below the secrecy capacity. The results apply to general source model without helpers or wiretapper's side information but can be strengthened for hypergraphical sources. In particular, for the pairwise independent network, the results give rise to a complete characterization of the maximum secret key rate achievable under a constraint on the total discussion rate.
Communication complexity refers to the minimum rate of public communication required for generating a maximal-rate secret key (SK) in the multiterminal source model of Csiszar and Narayan. Tyagi recently characterized this communication complexity for a two-terminal system. We extend the ideas in Tyagi's work to derive a lower bound on communication complexity in the general multiterminal setting. In the important special case of the complete graph pairwise independent network (PIN) model, our bound allows us to determine the exact linear communication complexity, i.e., the communication compl…
Hypergraphical sources are a natural class of sources for secret key generation, within which different subsets of terminals sharing secrets are allowed to discuss publicly in order to agree upon a global secret key. While their secrecy capacity, i.e., the maximum rate of a secret key that can be agreed upon by the entire set of terminals, is well-understood, what remains open is the maximum rate of a secret key that can be generated when there is a restriction on the overall rate of public discussion allowed. In this work, we obtain a family of explicitly computable upper bounds on the number…
The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to filter out strongly correlated components for generating a common secret key. The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate m…
Physical-layer key generation (PKG) based on channel reciprocity has recently emerged as a new technique to establish secret keys between devices. Most works focus on pairwise communication scenarios with single or small-scale antennas. However, the fifth generation (5G) wireless communications employ massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to support multiple users simultaneously, bringing serious overhead of reciprocal channel acquisition. This paper presents a multi-user secret key generation in massive MIMO wireless networks. We provide a beam domain channel model, in which different…
The problem of secure broadcasting with independent secret keys is studied. The particular scenario is analyzed in which a common message has to be broadcast to two legitimate receivers, while keeping an external eavesdropper ignorant of it. The transmitter shares independent secret keys of sufficiently high rates with both legitimate receivers, which can be used in different ways: they can be used as one-time pads to encrypt the common message, as fictitious messages for wiretap coding, or as a hybrid of these. In this paper, capacity results are established when the broadcast channels involv…
This paper considers the problem of information-theoretic Secret Key Establishment (SKE) in the presence of a passive adversary, Eve, when Alice and Bob are connected by a pair of independent discrete memoryless broadcast channels in opposite directions. We refer to this setup as 2DMBC. We define the secret-key capacity in the 2DMBC setup and prove lower and upper bounds on this capacity. The lower bound is achieved by a two-round SKE protocol that uses a two-level coding construction. We show that the lower and the upper bounds coincide in the case of degraded DMBCs.
We consider a pair-wise independent network where every pair of terminals in the network observes a common pair-wise source that is independent of all the sources accessible to the other pairs. We propose a method for secret key agreement in such a network that is based on well-established point-to-point techniques and repeated application of the one-time pad. Three specific problems are investigated. 1) Each terminal's observations are correlated only with the observations of a central terminal. All these terminals wish to generate a common secret key. 2) In a pair-wise independent network, t…
Alice and Bob want to share a secret key and to communicate an independent message, both of which they desire to be kept secret from an eavesdropper Eve. We study this problem of secret communication and secret key generation when two resources are available -- correlated sources at Alice, Bob, and Eve, and a noisy broadcast channel from Alice to Bob and Eve which is independent of the sources. We are interested in characterizing the fundamental trade-off between the rates of the secret message and secret key. We present an achievable solution and prove its optimality for the parallel channels…
We study the generation of a secret key of maximum rate by a pair of terminals observing correlated sources and with the means to communicate over a noiseless public com- munication channel. Our main result establishes a structural equivalence between the generation of a maximum rate secret key and the generation of a common randomness that renders the observations of the two terminals conditionally independent. The minimum rate of such common randomness, termed interactive common information, is related to Wyner's notion of common information, and serves to characterize the minimum rate of in…
This work considers the problem of multiterminal secret key agreement by limited total public discussion under the hypergraphical source model. The secrecy capacity as a function of the total discussion rate is completely characterized by a polynomial-time computable linear program. Compared to the existing solution for a particular hypergraphical source model called the pairwise independent network (PIN) model, the current result is a non-trivial extension as it applies to a strictly larger class of sources and a more general scenario involving helpers and wiretapper's side information. In pa…
In the multiterminal secret key agreement problem, a set of users want to discuss with each other until they share a common secret key independent of their discussion. We want to characterize the maximum secret key rate, called the secrecy capacity, asymptotically when the total discussion rate goes to zero. In the case of only two users, the capacity is equal to the Gács-Körner common information. However, when there are more than two users, the capacity is unknown. It is plausible that a multivariate extension of the Gács-Körner common information is the capacity, however, proving the conver…
In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation for multiple parties. Multi-user networks usually require a trusted party to efficiently distribute keys to the legitimate users and this process is a weakness against eavesdroppers. With the help of the physical layer security techniques, users can securely decide on a secret key without a trusted party by exploiting the unique properties of the channel. In this context, we develop a physical layer group key generation scheme that is also based on the ideas of the analog function computation studies. We firstly consider the key g…
We consider perfect secret key generation for a ``pairwise independent network'' model in which every pair of terminals share a random binary string, with the strings shared by distinct terminal pairs being mutually independent. The terminals are then allowed to communicate interactively over a public noiseless channel of unlimited capacity. All the terminals as well as an eavesdropper observe this communication. The objective is to generate a perfect secret key shared by a given set of terminals at the largest rate possible, and concealed from the eavesdropper. First, we show how the notion o…
This paper investigates the problem of secret key generation over a wiretap channel when the terminals observe correlated sources. These sources are independent of the main channel and the users overhear them before the transmission takes place. A novel achievable scheme is proposed, and its optimality is shown under certain less-noisy conditions. This result improves upon the existing literature where the more stringent condition of degradedness is required. Furthermore, numerical evaluation of the proposed scheme and previously reported results for a binary model are presented; a comparison …
In this article, we study the problem of secret key generation in the multiterminal source model, where the terminals have access to correlated Gaussian sources. We assume that the sources form a Markov chain on a tree. We give a nested lattice-based key generation scheme whose computational complexity is polynomial in the number, N , of independent and identically distributed samples observed by each source. We also compute the achievable secret key rate and give a class of examples where our scheme is optimal in the fine quantization limit. However, we also give examples that show that our s…
We study the distributed multi-user secret sharing (DMUSS) problem under the perfect privacy condition. In a DMUSS problem, multiple secret messages are deployed and the shares are offloaded to the storage nodes. Moreover, the access structure is extremely incomplete, as the decoding collection of each secret message has only one set, and by the perfect privacy condition such collection is also the colluding collection of all other secret messages. The secret message rate is defined as the size of the secret message normalized by the size of a share. We characterize the capacity region of the …
The problem of Secret Key Establishment (SKE) over a pair of independent Discrete Memoryless Broadcast Channels (DMBCs) has already been studied in \cite{Ah10}, where we provided lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. In this paper, we study the above setup under each of the following two cases: (1) the DMBCs have secrecy potential, and (2) the DMBCs are stochastically degraded with independent channels. In the former case, we propose a simple SKE protocol based on a novel technique, called Interactive Channel Coding (ICC), and prove that it achieves the lower bound. In the latter …
We revisit the problem of secret key agreement using interactive public communication for two parties and propose a new secret key agreement protocol. The protocol attains the secret key capacity for general observations and attains the second-order asymptotic term in the maximum length of a secret key for independent and identically distributed observations. In contrast to the previously suggested secret key agreement protocols, the proposed protocol uses interactive communication. In fact, the standard one-way communication protocol used prior to this work fails to attain the asymptotic resu…
This paper considers secret-key generation between several agents and a base station that observe independent and identically distributed realizations of correlated random variables. Each agent wishes to generate the longest possible individual key with the base station by means of public communication. All keys must be jointly kept secret from all external entities. In this many-to-one secret-key generation setting, it can be shown that the agents can take advantage of a collective protocol to increase the sum-rate of their generated keys. However, when each agent is only interested in maximi…
We study the problem of generating a shared secret key between two terminals in a joint source-channel setup -- the sender communicates to the receiver over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel and additionally the terminals have access to correlated discrete memoryless source sequences. We establish lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. These bounds coincide, establishing the capacity, when the underlying channel consists of independent, parallel and reversely degraded wiretap channels. In the lower bound, the equivocation terms of the source and channel components are functiona…
Wireless communication is susceptible to eavesdropping attacks because of its broadcast nature. This paper illustrates how interference can be used to counter eavesdropping and assist secrecy. In particular, a wire-tap channel with a helping interferer (WT-HI) is considered. Here, a transmitter sends a confidential message to its intended receiver in the presence of a passive eavesdropper and with the help of an independent interferer. The interferer, which does not know the confidential message, helps in ensuring the secrecy of the message by sending an independent signal. An achievable secre…
This paper studies the private key generation of a cooperative pairwise-independent network (PIN) with M+2 terminals (Alice, Bob and M relays), M >= 2. In this PIN, the correlated sources observed by every pair of terminals are independent of those sources observed by any other pair of terminal. All the terminals can communicate with each other over a public channel which is also observed by Eve noiselessly. The objective is to generate a private key between Alice and Bob under the help of the M relays; such a private key needs to be protected not only from Eve but also from individual relays …
For a discrete or a continuous source model, we study the problem of secret-key generation with one round of rate-limited public communication between two legitimate users. Although we do not provide new bounds on the wiretap secret-key (WSK) capacity for the discrete source model, we use an alternative achievability scheme that may be useful for practical applications. As a side result, we conveniently extend known bounds to the case of a continuous source model. Specifically, we consider a sequential key-generation strategy, that implements a rate-limited reconciliation step to handle reliab…
Information theoretic secret key agreement is impossible without making initial assumptions. One type of initial assumption is correlated random variables that are generated by using a noisy channel that connects the terminals. Terminals use the correlated random variables and communication over a reliable public channel to arrive at a shared secret key. Previous channel models assume that each terminal either controls one input to the channel, or receives one output variable of the channel. In this paper, we propose a new channel model of transceivers where each terminal simultaneously contro…
We consider a coded cooperative data exchange problem with the goal of generating a secret key. Specifically, we investigate the number of public transmissions required for a set of clients to agree on a secret key with probability one, subject to the constraint that it remains private from an eavesdropper. Although the problems are closely related, we prove that secret key generation with fewest number of linear transmissions is NP-hard, while it is known that the analogous problem in traditional cooperative data exchange can be solved in polynomial time. In doing this, we completely characte…
We propose a biometric identification system where the chosen- and generated-secret keys are used simultaneously, and investigate its fundamental limits from information-theoretic perspectives. The system consists of two phases: enrollment and identification phases. In the enrollment phase, for each user, the encoder uses a secret key, which is chosen independently, and the biometric identifier to generate another secret key and a helper {data}. In the identification phase, observing the biometric sequence of the identified user, the decoder estimates index, chosen- and generated-secret keys o…
We consider the problem of secret key agreement in Gaussian Maurer's Model. In Gaussian Maurer's model, legitimate receivers, Alice and Bob, and a wire-tapper, Eve, receive signals randomly generated by a satellite through three independent memoryless Gaussian channels respectively. Then Alice and Bob generate a common secret key from their received signals. In this model, we propose a protocol for generating a common secret key by using the result of soft-decision of Alice and Bob's received signals. Then, we calculate a lower bound on the secret key rate in our proposed protocol. As a result…
Multiple parties observing correlated data seek to recover each other's data and attain omniscience. To that end, they communicate interactively over a noiseless broadcast channel - each bit transmitted over this channel is received by all the parties. We give a universal interactive communication protocol, termed the recursive data exchange protocol (RDE), which attains omniscience for any sequence of data observed by the parties and provide an individual sequence guarantee of performance. As a by-product, for observations of length $n$, we show the universal rate optimality of RDE up to an $…
We consider information theoretic secret key agreement and secure function computation by multiple parties observing correlated data, with access to an interactive public communication channel. Our main result is an upper bound on the secret key length, which is derived using a reduction of binary hypothesis testing to multiparty secret key agreement. Building on this basic result, we derive new converses for multiparty secret key agreement. Furthermore, we derive converse results for the oblivious transfer problem and the bit commitment problem by relating them to secret key agreement. Finall…
Two legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, wish to generate secret keys from the wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper, referred to as Eve, in order to use such keys for encryption and decryption. In general, the secret key rate highly depends on the coherence time of the channel. In particular, a straightforward method of generating secret keys in static environments results in ultra-low rates. In order to resolve this problem, we introduce a low-complexity method called induced randomness. In this method, Alice and Bob independently generate local randomness to be us…
Covert and secret quantum key distribution aims at generating information-theoretically secret bits between distant legitimate parties in a manner that remains provably undetectable by an adversary. We propose a framework in which to precisely define and analyze such an operation, and we show that covert and secret key expansion is possible. For fixed and known classical-quantum channels, we develop and analyze protocols based on forward and reverse reconciliation. When the adversary applies the same quantum channel independently on each transmitted quantum state, akin to a collective attack i…
We consider the problem of multiterminal secret key agreement (SKA) in wiretapped source model where terminals have access to samples of correlated random variables from a publicly known joint probability distribution. The adversary has access to a side information variable, that is correlated with terminals' variables. We focus on a special type of terminal variables in this model, known as Tree-PIN, where the relation between variables of the terminals can be represented by a tree. The study of Tree-PIN source model is of practical importance as it can be realized in wireless network environ…
CY Paris University（巴黎CY大学）；ENSEA（法国高等电力学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
This paper presents a systematic approach to use channel state information for authentication and secret key distillation for physical layer security (PLS). We use popular machine learning (ML) methods and signal processing-based approaches to disentangle the large scale fading and be used as a source of uniqueness, from the small scale fading, to be treated as a source of shared entropy secret key generation (SKG). The ML-based approaches are completely unsupervised and hence avoid exhaustive measurement campaigns. We also propose using the Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC); our s…
In the paper we propose general framework for Automatic Secret Generation and Sharing (ASGS) that should be independent of underlying secret sharing scheme. ASGS allows to prevent the dealer from knowing the secret or even to eliminate him at all. Two situations are discussed. First concerns simultaneous generation and sharing of the random, prior nonexistent secret. Such a secret remains unknown until it is reconstructed. Next, we propose the framework for automatic sharing of a known secret. In this case the dealer does not know the secret and the secret owner does not know the shares. We pr…
Secret Key Rate Analysis of RIS-Assisted THz MIMO CV-QKD Systems under Access-Constrained Eavesdropping
Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar（印度理工学院布巴内斯瓦尔分校）；National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波迪斯特里阿斯大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed multi-user secret sharing, including a trusted master node, $N\in \mathbb{N}$ storage nodes, and $K$ users, where each user has access to the contents of a subset of storage nodes. Each user has an independent secret message with certain rate, defined as the size of the message normalized by the size of a storage node. Having access to the secret messages, the trusted master node places encoded shares in the storage nodes, such that (i) each user can recover its own message from the content of the storage nodes that it has access to, (ii) each…
We consider the strong secret key (SK) agreement problem for the satellite communication setting, where a satellite chooses a common binary phase shift keying modulated input for three statistically independent additive white Gaussian noise measurement channels whose outputs are observed by two legitimate transceivers (Alice and Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve), respectively. Legitimate transceivers have access to an authenticated, noiseless, two-way, and public communication link, so they can exchange multiple rounds of public messages to agree on a SK hidden from Eve. Without loss of essential…
