Secret Key Generation Between Ambient Backscatter Devices

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openAccess

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2023-02-07

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

13
13456-13468

Series

IEEE Access, Volume 11

Abstract

We analyze secret key generation between ambient backscatter devices where the channel between an ambient transmitter and the backscatter devices is used as a source of randomness. The devices do not need to estimate or measure the channel between themselves, which greatly simplifies the gathering of raw key material. We analyze the eavesdropper's mutual information based on fundamental principles and apply privacy amplification to remove any information that the eavesdropper overheard during the error correction phase. We show how the legitimate users can estimate the eavesdropper's knowledge and trade off between achievable key rate and the eavesdropper's knowledge of the final key. When modeling the channel between the ambient transmitter and the backscatter devices using state-of-the-art 3GPP channel models we show that even in non-line-of-sight channels the distance from legitimate users to an eavesdropper being larger than a few wavelengths is not alone a sufficient security guarantee. This is in contrast with previous secret key generation methods where distance is assumed to prevent the eavesdropper from having any information about the key prior to error correction. Our simulations show that a distance based approach is too optimistic and there is a possibility that the eavesdropper still knows a substantial part of the final key.

Description

Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the Academy of Finland under Grant 334539. Publisher Copyright: © 2013 IEEE.

Keywords

ambient backscatter communication, physical layer security, Secret key generation

Other note

Citation

Lietzen , J & Tirkkonen , O 2023 , ' Secret Key Generation Between Ambient Backscatter Devices ' , IEEE Access , vol. 11 , pp. 13456-13468 . https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3243063