Design and Implementation of Physical Layer Private Key Setting for Wireless Networks

Due to the enormous spreading of applied wireless networks, security is actually one of the most important issues for telecommunications. One of the main issue in the field of securing wireless information exchanging is the initial common knowledge between source and destination. A shared secret is normally mandatory in order to decide the encryption (algorithm or code or key) of the information stream. It is usual to exchange this common a priori knowledge by using a "secure" channel. Nowadays a secure wireless channel is not possible. In fact normally the common a priori knowledge is already established (but this is not secure) or by using a non-radio channel (that implies a waste of time and resource). This contribution deals with the proposal of a new modulation technique ensuring secure communication in a full wireless environment. The information is modulated, at physical layer, by the thermal noise experienced by the link between two terminals. A loop scheme is designed for unique recovering of mutual information. The probability of error/detection is analytically derived for the legal users and for the third unwanted listener. The proposed scheme has also been implemented in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA. All the results show that the performance of the proposed scheme yields the advantage of intrinsic security, i.e., the mutual information cannot be physically demodulated (passive attack) or denied (active attack) by a third terminal, leading us to conclude that the proposed technique is really useful for private key distribution in every wireless network. ©2009 IEEE.