ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2013, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (3): 20-25.doi: DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2013.03.003

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Methodologies of Secret-Key Agreement Using Wireless Channel Characteristics

Syed Taha Ali and Vijay Sivaraman   

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia
  • Received:2013-07-11 Online:2013-09-25 Published:2013-09-25
  • About author:Syed Taha Ali (taha@unsw.edu.au) received his BSc.(Eng) degree from the GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, in 2002. He received his MSc from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 2006. He recently concluded his PhD degree at UNSW, writing a thesis on developing novel security mechanisms for body sensor networks. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, network mobility, software defined networks, and applied network security. His work has appeared at ACM WiSec, IEEE SECON, IEEE BodyNets and IEEE TrustCom. He has been published in journals such asIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing andElsevier Future Generation Computer Systems . He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Electrical Engineering, UNSW.

    Vijay Sivaraman (vijay@unsw.edu.au) (M′94) received his BTech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1994. He received his MS degree from North Carolina State University in 1996. He received his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. He has worked at Bell-Labs and at a Silicon Valley start-up, where he was involved in manufacturing optical switch routers. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW, and a visiting researcher at the CSIRO ICT Centre. He has considerable experience working with network routing protocols and QoS mechanisms and has initiated and led projects on optical networking, energy-efficient networks, power optimization and security protocols for wearable devices, and sensor networks for air pollution monitoring. His work has appeared at conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM and ACM CoNEXT and has been published in prestigious journals such asIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking ,IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication , andIEEE Transactions on Image Processing .

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Abstract: In this article, we give an overview of current research on shared secret-key agreement between two parties. This agreement is based on radio wireless channel characteristics. We discuss the advantages of this approach over traditional cryptographic mechanisms and present the theoretical background of this approach. We then give a detailed description of the key-agreement process and the threat model, and we summarize the typical performance metrics for shared secret-key agreement. There are four processes in shared secret-key agreement: sampling, quantization, information reconciliation, and privacy amplification. We classify prior and current research in this area according to innovation on these four processes. We conclude with a discussion of existing challenges and directions for future work.

Key words: physical-layer security, secret key generation