Shared Secret Key Generation by Exploiting Inaudible Acoustic Channels

To build a secure wireless networking system, it is essential that the cryptographic key is known only to the two (or more) communicating parties. Existing key extraction schemes put the devices into physical proximity and utilize the common inherent randomness between the devices to agree on a secret key, but they often rely on specialized hardware (e.g., the specific wireless NIC model) and have low bit rates. In this article, we seek a key extraction approach that only leverages off-the-shelf mobile devices, while achieving significantly higher key generation efficiency. The core idea of our approach is to exploit the fast varying inaudible acoustic channel as the common random source for key generation and wireless parallel communication for exchanging reconciliation information to improve the key generation rate. We have carefully studied and validated the feasibility of our approach through both theoretical analysis and a variety of measurements. We implement our approach on different mobile devices and conduct extensive experiments in different real scenarios. The experiment results show that our approach achieves high efficiency and satisfactory robustness. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach improves the key generation rate by 38.46% and reduces the bit mismatch ratio by 42.34%.

Review of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs): Structures, Models, and Algorithms

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are now an essential component for strengthening the security of Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices. These devices are an important component in many infrastructure systems such as telehealth, commerce, industry, etc. Traditionally these devices are the weakest link in the security of the system since they have limited storage, processing, and energy resources. Furthermore they are located in unsecured environments and could easily be the target of tampering and various types of attacks. We review in this work the structure of most salient types of PUF systems such as static RAM static random access memory (SRAM), ring oscillator (RO), arbiter PUFs, coating PUFs and dynamic RAM dynamic random access memory (DRAM). We discuss statistical models for the five most common types of PUFs and identify the main parameters defining their performance. We review some of the most recent algorithms that can be used to provide stable authentication and secret key generation without having to use helper data or secure sketch algorithms. Finally we provide results showing the performance of these devices and how they depend on the authentication algorithm used and the main system parameters.

Mosaics of combinatorial designs for information-theoretic security

We study security functions which can serve to establish semantic security for the two central problems of information-theoretic security: the wiretap channel, and privacy amplification for secret key generation. The security functions are functional forms of mosaics of combinatorial designs, more precisely, of group divisible designs and balanced incomplete block designs. Every member of a mosaic is associated with a unique color, and each color corresponds to a unique message or key value. Every block index of the mosaic corresponds to a public seed shared between the two trusted communicating parties. The seed set should be as small as possible. We give explicit examples which have an optimal or nearly optimal trade-off of seed length versus color (i.e., message or key) rate. We also derive bounds for the security performance of security functions given by functional forms of mosaics of designs.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multi-User Robust Secret Key Generation for Low-Entropy Environments

Channel secret key generation (CSKG), assisted by the new material intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), has become a new research hotspot recently. In this paper, the key extraction method in the IRS-aided low-entropy communication scenario with adjacent multi-users is investigated. Aiming at the problem of low key generation efficiency due to the high similarity of channels between users, we propose a joint user allocation and IRS reflection parameter adjustment scheme, while the reliability of information exchange during the key generation process is also considered. Specifically, the relevant key capability expressions of the IRS-aided communication system is analyzed. Then, we study how to adjust the IRS reflection matrix and allocate the corresponding users to minimize the similarity of different channels and ensure the robustness of key generation. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can bring higher gains to the performance of key generation.