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, two designated terminals wish to generate a secret key with the help of other terminals. 3) All the terminals in a pair-wise independent network wish to generate a common secret key. A separate protocol for each of these problems is proposed. Furthermore, we show that the protocols for the first two problems are optimal and the protocol for the third problem is efficient, in terms of the resulting secret key rates.
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…
We present a key recovery attack against Y. Wang's Random Linear Code Encryption (RLCE) scheme recently submitted to the NIST call for post-quantum cryptography. This attack recovers the secret key for all the short key parameters proposed by the author.
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 problems of authentication using secret key generation under a privacy constraint on the enrolled source data. An adversary who has access to the stored description and correlated side information tries to deceive the authentication as well as learn about the source. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the compression rate of the stored description, the leakage rate of the source data, and the exponent of the adversary's maximum false acceptance probability. The related problem of secret key generation with a privacy constraint is also studied where the optimal tradeoff be…
This paper investigates generation of a secret key from a reciprocal wireless channel. In particular we consider wireless channels that exhibit sparse structure in the wideband regime and the impact of the sparsity on the secret key capacity. We explore this problem in two steps. First, we study key generation from a state-dependent discrete memoryless multiple source. The state of source captures the effect of channel sparsity. Secondly, we consider a wireless channel model that captures channel sparsity and correlation between the legitimate users' channel and the eavesdropper's channel. Suc…
A new scenario for generating a secret key and two private keys among three Terminals in the presence of an external eavesdropper is considered. Terminals 1, 2 and 3 intend to share a common secret key concealed from the external eavesdropper (Terminal 4) and simultaneously, each of Terminals 1 and 2 intends to share a private key with Terminal 3 while keeping it concealed from each other and from Terminal 4. All four Terminals observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources and there is a public channel from Terminal 3 to Terminals 1 and 2. An inner bound of the "secret key-private keys capacity…
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 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…
Secret-key generation in a wireless environment exploiting the randomness and reciprocity of the channel gains is considered. A new channel model is proposed which takes into account the effect of reflections (or re-radiations) from receive antenna elements, thus capturing an physical property of practical antennas. It turns out that the reflections have a deteriorating effect on the achievable secret-key rate between the legitimate nodes at high signal-to-noise-power-ratio (SNR). The insights provide guidelines in the design and operation of communication systems using the properties of the w…
The unique information ($UI$) is an information measure that quantifies a deviation from the Blackwell order. We have recently shown that this quantity is an upper bound on the one-way secret key rate. In this paper, we prove a triangle inequality for the $UI$, which implies that the $UI$ is never greater than one of the best known upper bounds on the two-way secret key rate. We conjecture that the $UI$ lower bounds the two-way rate and discuss implications of the conjecture.
In this paper, we study the problem of secret key generation from both correlated sources and a secure channel. We obtain the optimal secret key rate in this problem and show that the optimal scheme is to conduct secret key generation and key distribution jointly, where every bit in the secret channel will yield more than one bit of secret key rate. This joint scheme is better than the separation-based scheme, where the secure channel is used for key distribution, and as a result, every bit in the secure channel can only provide one bit of secret key rate.
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…
We propose an approach for constructing secret and private keys based on the long-known Slepian-Wolf code, due to Wyner, for correlated sources connected by a virtual additive noise channel. Our work is motivated by results of Csiszár and Narayan which highlight innate connections between secrecy generation by multiple terminals that observe correlated source signals and Slepian-Wolf near-lossless data compression. Explicit procedures for such constructions and their substantiation are provided. The performance of low density parity check channel codes in devising a new class of secret keys is…
We analyze the fundamental trade-off of secret key-based authentication systems in the presence of an eavesdropper for correlated Gaussian sources. A complete characterization of trade-off among secret-key, storage, and privacy-leakage rates of both generated and chosen secret models is provided. One of the main contributions is revealing that unlike the known results for discrete sources, there is no need for the second auxiliary random variable in characterizing the capacity regions for the Gaussian cases. In addition, it is shown that the strong secrecy for secrecy-leakage of the systems ca…
We consider the problem of identification and authentication based on secret key generation from some user-generated source data (e.g., a biometric source). The goal is to reliably identify users pre-enrolled in a database as well as authenticate them based on the estimated secret key while preserving the privacy of the enrolled data and of the generated keys. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the identification rate, the compression rate of the users' source data, information leakage rate, and secret key rate. In particular, we provide a coding strategy based on layered random binn…
We design and analyze a method to extract secret keys from the randomness inherent to wireless channels. We study a channel model for multipath wireless channel and exploit the channel diversity in generating secret key bits. We compare the key extraction methods based both on entire channel state information (CSI) and on single channel parameter such as the received signal strength indicators (RSSI). Due to the reduction in the degree-of-freedom when going from CSI to RSSI, the rate of key extraction based on CSI is far higher than that based on RSSI. This suggests that exploiting channel div…
We introduce explicit schemes based on the polarization phenomenon for the tasks of one-way secret key agreement from common randomness and private channel coding. For the former task, we show how to use common randomness and insecure one-way communication to obtain a strongly secure key such that the key construction has a complexity essentially linear in the blocklength and the rate at which the key is produced is optimal, i.e., equal to the one-way secret-key rate. For the latter task, we present a private channel coding scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity using the condition of stron…
This work is motivated by recent results of Csiszar and Narayan (IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory, Dec. 2004), which highlight innate connections between secrecy generation by multiple terminals and multiterminal Slepian-Wolf near-lossless data compression (sans secrecy restrictions). We propose a new approach for constructing secret and private keys based on the long-known Slepian-Wolf code for sources connected by a virtual additive noise channel, due to Wyner (IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory, Jan. 1974). Explicit procedures for such constructions, and their substantiation, are provided.
Information-theoretic secret key agreement (SKA) protocols are a fundamental cryptographic primitive that are used to establish a shared secret key between two or more parties. In a two-party SKA in source model, Alice and Bob have samples of two correlated variables, that are partially leaked to Eve, and their goal is to establish a shared secret key by communicating over a reliable public channel. Eve must have no information about the established key. In this paper, we study the problem of one-message secret key agreement where the key is established by Alice sending a single message to Bob…
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 the secret key generation problem when sources are randomly excited by the sender and there is a noiseless public discussion channel. Our setting is thus similar to recent works on channels with action-dependent states where the channel state may be influenced by some of the parties involved. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity through a type of source emulation analysis. We also derive lower bounds on the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents, i.e., the exponential rates of decay of the probability of decoding error and of the information leakage…
The aim of this paper is to prove coding theorems for the wiretap channel coding problem and secret key agreement problem based on the the notion of a hash property for an ensemble of functions. These theorems imply that codes using sparse matrices can achieve the optimal rate. Furthermore, fixed-rate universal coding theorems for a wiretap channel and a secret key agreement are also proved.
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…
A secret-key generation scheme based on a layered broadcasting strategy is introduced for slow-fading channels. In the model considered, Alice wants to share a key with Bob while keeping the key secret from Eve, who is a passive eavesdropper. Both Alice-Bob and Alice-Eve channels are assumed to undergo slow fading, and perfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed to be known only at the receivers during the transmission. In each fading slot, Alice broadcasts a continuum of coded layers and, hence, allows Bob to decode at the rate corresponding to the fading state (unknown to Alice). The …
By exploiting multipath fading channels as a source of common randomness, physical layer (PHY) based key generation protocols allow two terminals with correlated observations to generate secret keys with information-theoretical security. The state of the art, however, still suffers from major limitations, e.g., low key generation rate, lower entropy of key bits and a high reliance on node mobility. In this paper, a novel cooperative key generation protocol is developed to facilitate high-rate key generation in narrowband fading channels, where two keying nodes extract the phase randomness of t…
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…
Full-duplex (FD) communication is regarded as a key technology in future 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In addition to high data rate constraints, the success of these systems depends on the ability to allow for confidentiality and security. Secret-key agreement from reciprocal wireless channels can be regarded as a valuable supplement for security at the physical layer. In this work, we study the role of FD communication in conjunction with secret-key agreement. We first introduce two complementary key generation models for FD and half-duplex (HD) settings and compare the performanc…
We consider a model for secrecy generation, with three terminals, by means of public interterminal communication, and examine the problem of characterizing all the rates at which all three terminals can generate a ``secret key,'' and -- simultaneously -- two designated terminals can generate a ``private key'' which is effectively concealed from the remaining terminal; both keys are also concealed from an eavesdropper that observes the public communication. Inner and outer bounds for the ``secret key--private key capacity region'' are derived. Under a certain special condition, these bounds coi…
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.
Information-theoretic secret-key agreement is perhaps the most practically feasible mechanism that provides unconditional security at the physical layer to date. In this paper, we consider the problem of secret-key agreement by sharing randomness at low power over an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) link, in the presence of an eavesdropper. The low power assumption greatly simplifies the design of the randomness sharing scheme, even in a fading channel scenario. We assess the performance of the proposed system in terms of secrecy key rate and show that a practical approach to …
This paper investigates the secret key generation in the multiterminal source model, where users observing correlated sources discuss interactively under limited rates to agree on a secret key. We focus on a class of sources representable by minimally connected hypergraphs. For such sources, we give a single-letter explicit characterization of the region of achievable secret key rate and public discussion rate tuple. This is the first result that completely characterizes the achievable rate region for a multiterminal source model, which is beyond the PIN model on a tree. We also obtain an expl…
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…
A secret key agreement setup between three users is considered in which each of the users 1 and 2 intends to share a secret key with user 3 and users 1 and 2 are eavesdroppers with respect to each other. The three users observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources and there is a generalized discrete memoryless multiple access channel (GDMMAC) from users 1 and 2 to user 3 for communication between the users. The secret key agreement is established using the correlated sources and the GDMMAC. In this setup, inner and outer bounds of the secret key capacity region are investigated. Moreover, for …
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 consider secret key generation from relative localization information of a pair of nodes in a mobile wireless network in the presence of a mobile eavesdropper. Our problem can be categorized under the source models of information theoretic secrecy, where the distance between the legitimate nodes acts as the observed common randomness. We characterize the theoretical limits on the achievable secret key bit rate, in terms of the observation noise variance at the legitimate nodes and the eavesdropper. This work provides a framework that combines information theoretic secrecy and wireless local…
This paper develops a novel framework for sharing secret keys using existing Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocols. Our approach exploits the multi-path nature of the wireless environment to hide the key from passive eavesdroppers. The proposed framework does not assume the availability of any prior channel state information (CSI) and exploits only the one bit ACK/NACK feedback from the legitimate receiver. Compared with earlier approaches, the main innovation lies in the distribution of key bits among multiple ARQ frames. Interestingly, this idea allows for achieving a positive secrecy rat…
This paper proposes an efficient secret key cryptosystem based on polar codes over Binary Erasure Channel. We introduce a method, for the first time to our knowledge, to hide the generator matrix of the polar codes from an attacker. In fact, our main goal is to achieve secure and reliable communication using finite-length polar codes. The proposed cryptosystem has a significant security advantage against chosen plaintext attacks in comparison with the Rao-Nam cryptosystem. Also, the key length is decreased after applying a new compression algorithm. Moreover, this scheme benefits from high cod…
We propose a simple yet complete lattice-based scheme for secret key generation from Gaussian sources in the presence of an eavesdropper, and show that it achieves strong secret key rates up to 1/2 nat from the optimal in the case of "degraded" source models. The novel ingredient of our scheme is a lattice-hashing technique, based on the notions of flatness factor and channel intrinsic randomness. The proposed scheme does not require dithering.
We investigate the problem of covert and secret key generation over a state-dependent discrete memoryless channel with one-way public discussion in which an adversary, the warden, may arbitrarily choose the channel state. We develop an adaptive protocol that, under conditions that we explicitly specify, not only allows the transmitter and the legitimate receiver to exchange a secret key but also conceals from the active warden whether the protocol is being run. When specialized to passive adversaries that do not control the channel state, we partially characterize the covert secret key capacit…
We present a secret key agreement (SKA) protocol for a multi-user time-division duplex system where a base-station (BS) with a large antenna array (LAA) shares secret keys with users in the presence of non-colluding eavesdroppers. In the system, when the BS transmits random sequences to legitimate users for sharing common randomness, the eavesdroppers can attempt the pilot contamination attack (PCA) in which each of eavesdroppers transmits its target user's training sequence in hopes of acquiring possible information leak by steering beam towards the eavesdropper. We show that there exists a c…
This paper investigates the role of the eavesdropper's statistics in the implementation of a practical secret-key generation system. We carefully conduct the information-theoretic analysis of a secret-key generation system from wireless channel gains measured with software-defined radios. In particular, we show that it is inaccurate to assume that the eavesdropper gets no information because of decorrelation with distance. We also provide a bound for the achievable secret-key rate in the finite key-length regime that takes into account the presence of correlated eavesdropper's observations. We…
This paper considers the problem of secret-key agreement with public discussion subject to a peak power constraint $A$ on the channel input. The optimal input distribution is proved to be discrete with finite support. The result is obtained by first transforming the secret-key channel model into an equivalent Gaussian wiretap channel with better noise statistics at the legitimate receiver and then using the fact that the optimal distribution of the Gaussian wiretap channel is discrete. To overcome the computationally heavy search for the optimal discrete distribution, several suboptimal scheme…
A secret key can be used to conceal information from an eavesdropper during communication, as in Shannon's cipher system. Most theoretical guarantees of secrecy require the secret key space to grow exponentially with the length of communication. Here we show that when an eavesdropper attempts to reconstruct an information sequence, as posed in the literature by Yamamoto, very little secret key is required to effect unconditionally maximal distortion; specifically, we only need the secret key space to increase unboundedly, growing arbitrarily slowly with the blocklength. As a corollary, even wi…
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…
Physical-layer key generation (PKG) can generate symmetric keys between two communication ends based on the reciprocal uplink and downlink channels. By smartly reconfiguring the radio signal propagation, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is able to improve the secret key rate of PKG. However, existing works involving IRS-assisted PKG are concentrated in single-antenna wireless networks. So this paper investigates the problem of PKG in the IRS-assisted multiple-input single-output (MISO) system, which aims to maximize the secret key rate by optimally designing the IRS passive beamforming. Fi…
A new model of multi-party secret key agreement is proposed, in which one terminal called the communicator can transmit public messages to other terminals before all terminals agree on a secret key. A single-letter characterization of the achievable region is derived in the stationary memoryless case. The new model generalizes some other (old and new) models of key agreement. In particular, key generation with an omniscient helper is the special case where the communicator knows all sources, for which we derive a zero-rate one-shot converse for the secret key per bit of communication.
A secret key agreement framework between three users is considered in which each of the users 1 and 2 intends to share a secret key with user 3 and users 1 and 2 are eavesdroppers with respect to each other. There is a generalized discrete memoryless multiple access channel (GDMMAC) from users 1 and 2 to user 3 where the three users receive outputs from the channel. Furthermore, there is a broadcast channel (BC) from user 3 to users 1 and 2. Secret key sharing is intended where GDMMAC and BC can be successively used. In this framework, an inner bound of the secret key capacity region is derive…
We study the capacity of secret-key agreement over a wiretap channel with state parameters. The transmitter communicates to the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel with a memoryless state sequence. The transmitter and the legitimate receiver generate a shared secret key, that remains secret from the eavesdropper. No public discussion channel is available. The state sequence is known noncausally to the transmitter. We derive lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. The lower bound involves constructing a common state reconstruction seque…
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…
In the classical Secret-Key generation model, Common Randomness is generated by two terminals based on the observation of correlated components of a common source, while keeping it secret from a non-legitimate observer. It is assumed that the statistics of the source are known to all participants. In this work, the Secret-Key generation based on a compound source is studied where the realization of the source statistic is unknown. The protocol should guarantee the security and reliability of the generated Secret-Key, simultaneously for all possible realizations of the compound source. A single…
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…
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…
A source model for secret key generation between terminals is considered. Two users, namely users 1 and 2, at one side communicate with another user, namely user 3, at the other side via a public channel where three users can observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources. Each of users 1 and 2 intends to share a secret key with user 3 where user 1 acts as a wiretapper for user 2 and vice versa. In this model, two situations are considered: communication from users 1 and 2 to user 3 (the forward key strategy) and from user 3 to users 1 and 2 (the backward key strategy). In both situations, the g…
Secret-key agreement protocols over wiretap channels controlled by a state parameter are studied. The entire state sequence is known (non-causally) to the sender but not to the receiver and the eavesdropper. Upper and lower bounds on the secret-key capacity are established both with and without public discussion. The proposed coding scheme involves constructing a codebook to create common reconstruction of the state sequence at the sender and the receiver and another secret-key codebook constructed by random binning. For the special case of Gaussian channels, with no public discussion, - the s…
