Random patterns of secret keys from sampled IR-UWB channel responses

Iulia Tunaru (1) , Benoît Denis (1) , Bernard Uguen (2)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique

Key generation from reciprocal physical layer measurements (e.g. received signal strength, channel responses etc.) is an alternative to infrastructure-dependent key distribution techniques. Quantization of these intrinsically deterministic metrics should produce sufficiently long and robust keys with good randomness properties. Recent studies [1], [2] have provided a proof of concept for exploiting oversampled ultra wideband signals to generate secret keys with practical lengths. In this paper, we investigate the random character of such keys [1] extracted in noiseless conditions and improve it with a more complex quantization algorithm. Lastly, we statistically test the algorithms in noisy scenarios and show that our algorithm achieves a satisfactory performance in medium to high SNR scenarios, while improving the random pattern of keys obtained from deterministic signals.

Mots clés: Channel Impulse Responses Impulse Radio Indoor Environments Physical Layer Randomness Secret Key Generation Ultra Wideband

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Iulia Tunaru, Benoît Denis, Bernard Uguen. Random patterns of secret keys from sampled IR-UWB channel responses. IEEE International Conference on Ultra-WideBand (ICUWB), 2014, Paris, France. ⟨10.1109/ICUWB.2014.6958954⟩. ⟨hal-01127769⟩