Detection and defense of active attacks for generating secret key from wireless channels in static environment

In quasi-static or static environments, generating secret key from wireless channels is bad randomness and vulnerable to active attacks. To improve randomness of the generated secret key, singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques are used to construct equivalent wireless channels in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. SVD techniques and private pilot are used to detect active attacks by authenticating sender based on wireless channels. To defend passive eavesdropping and active attacks, the concept of one time pad is used to encrypt wireless channels with private pilot. The proposed SKG scheme based on private pilot and SVD techniques can not only detect whether SKG suffers active attacks, but also defend man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, signal injection attack, passive eavesdropping. What is more, the SKG scheme can obtain higher SKG rate and randomness than the approach via random beam-forming. Theoretical analysis and simulation results prove the above results again. (C) 2019 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.