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Secret key generation based on private pilot under man-in-the-middle attack

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  • Special Focus on Machine-Type Communications
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Abstract

Given the openness and invariance of public pilot, secret key generation (SKG) based on wireless channels is vulnerable to active attacks. In this paper, we explore man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where the attacker acts as a transparent relay to intercept channel state information and deduce the generated keys. To prevent this type of attacks, a dynamic private pilot is generated, where legitimate nodes first consider the information authenticated between them as seed information for the private pilot, and then generate the private pilot based on this seed information according to the pilot requirements. Then, both the new seed information and secret keys are dynamicaally derived from wireless channels that are estimated with the private pilot instead of a public pilot. The proposed private pilot encrypts and authenticates wireless channels, allowing an SKG rate close to that without attackers. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed SKG approach can effectively withstand an MITM attack.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed evaluation and constructive comments. This work was partially supported by National High-Tech R&D Program of China (863) (Grant No. SS2015AA011306), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61601514, 61379006, 61401510, 61521003, 61501516), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2016M592990).

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Correspondence to Liang Jin.

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Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Huang, Y., Jin, L., Li, N. et al. Secret key generation based on private pilot under man-in-the-middle attack. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 60, 100307 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9195-3

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