A wireless physically secure key distribution system

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wireless key distribution protocol leveraging light's noise for security, extending optical noise-based security concepts to mobile wireless channels, and evaluates its security level.

Contribution

It develops a wireless secure key distribution scheme based on light's noise, removing the need for optical channels and enabling mobile device applications.

Findings

The protocol achieves a quantifiable security level against eavesdropping.

It demonstrates the feasibility of applying optical noise security principles to wireless channels.

The scheme is suitable for mobile device integration.

Abstract

A secure key distribution protocol protected by light's noise was introduced in 2003 [Phys. Rev. A 68, 052307 (2003)]. That protocol utilized the shot noise of light present in the optical channel (eg., an optical fiber) to restrict information leaks to an adversary. An initial shared information between the legitimate users allowed them to extract more information from the channel than the one obtained by the adversary. That original paper recognized the need for a privacy amplification step but no specific protocol was presented. More recently that original idea was improved with a specific privacy amplification protocol [arXiv:1406.1543v2 [cs.CR] 8 Jul 2015] while keeping the use of an optical communication channel. This work merges main ideas of the protection given by the light's noise in a protocol applied to wireless channels. The use of a wireless channels together with recorded physical noise was introduced from 2005 to 2007 (see eg, arXiv:quant-ph/0510011 v2 16 Nov 2005 and arXiv:0705.2243v2 [quant-ph] 17 May 2007). This work improves those embrionary ideas of wireless channels secured by recorded optical noise. The need for specific optical channels is eliminated with the wireless variation and opens up the possibility to apply the technique to mobile devices. This work introduces this new scheme and calculates the associated security level.