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Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks

Lightweight session key agreement schemes are expected to play a central role in building Internet of things (IoT) security in sixth-generation (6G) networks. A well-established approach deriving from the physical layer is a secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness (in the form of wireless...

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Autores principales: Mitev, Miroslav, Chorti, Arsenia, Belmega, E. Veronica, Poor, H. Vincent
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34441100
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23080960
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author Mitev, Miroslav
Chorti, Arsenia
Belmega, E. Veronica
Poor, H. Vincent
author_facet Mitev, Miroslav
Chorti, Arsenia
Belmega, E. Veronica
Poor, H. Vincent
author_sort Mitev, Miroslav
collection PubMed
description Lightweight session key agreement schemes are expected to play a central role in building Internet of things (IoT) security in sixth-generation (6G) networks. A well-established approach deriving from the physical layer is a secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness (in the form of wireless fading coefficients). However, although practical, SKG schemes have been shown to be vulnerable to active attacks over the initial “advantage distillation” phase, throughout which estimates of the fading coefficients are obtained at the legitimate users. In fact, by injecting carefully designed signals during this phase, a man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack could manipulate and control part of the reconciled bits and thus render SKG vulnerable to brute force attacks. Alternatively, a denial of service attack can be mounted by a reactive jammer. In this paper, we investigate the impact of injection and jamming attacks during the advantage distillation in a multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) system. First, we show that a MiM attack can be mounted as long as the attacker has one extra antenna with respect to the legitimate users, and we propose a pilot randomization scheme that allows the legitimate users to successfully reduce the injection attack to a less harmful jamming attack. Secondly, by taking a game-theoretic approach we evaluate the optimal strategies available to the legitimate users in the presence of reactive jammers.
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spelling pubmed-83948022021-08-28 Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks Mitev, Miroslav Chorti, Arsenia Belmega, E. Veronica Poor, H. Vincent Entropy (Basel) Article Lightweight session key agreement schemes are expected to play a central role in building Internet of things (IoT) security in sixth-generation (6G) networks. A well-established approach deriving from the physical layer is a secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness (in the form of wireless fading coefficients). However, although practical, SKG schemes have been shown to be vulnerable to active attacks over the initial “advantage distillation” phase, throughout which estimates of the fading coefficients are obtained at the legitimate users. In fact, by injecting carefully designed signals during this phase, a man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack could manipulate and control part of the reconciled bits and thus render SKG vulnerable to brute force attacks. Alternatively, a denial of service attack can be mounted by a reactive jammer. In this paper, we investigate the impact of injection and jamming attacks during the advantage distillation in a multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) system. First, we show that a MiM attack can be mounted as long as the attacker has one extra antenna with respect to the legitimate users, and we propose a pilot randomization scheme that allows the legitimate users to successfully reduce the injection attack to a less harmful jamming attack. Secondly, by taking a game-theoretic approach we evaluate the optimal strategies available to the legitimate users in the presence of reactive jammers. MDPI 2021-07-27 /pmc/articles/PMC8394802/ /pubmed/34441100 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23080960 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Mitev, Miroslav
Chorti, Arsenia
Belmega, E. Veronica
Poor, H. Vincent
Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title_full Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title_fullStr Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title_full_unstemmed Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title_short Protecting Physical Layer Secret Key Generation from Active Attacks
title_sort protecting physical layer secret key generation from active attacks
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34441100
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23080960
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