Secret Key Generation on Aerial Rician Fading Channels Against a Curious Receiver

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel physical-layer secret key generation method leveraging drone mobility over Rician fading channels, optimizing drone trajectories to maximize key capacity against a curious eavesdropper.

Contribution

It introduces a new secret key generation protocol using drone movement and channel estimation, enhancing security in aerial networks with realistic fading conditions.

Findings

Trajectory optimization improves secret key capacity.

Numerical simulations confirm protocol effectiveness.

Method enhances security against curious eavesdroppers.

Abstract

Secret key generation at the physical layer is expected to be a fundamental enabler for next-generation networks. We consider a network where the user equipment is a drone and propose a novel secret key generation solution when the eavesdropper is another node belonging to the network (curious device). We exploit drone mobility over realistic Rician fading channels. In our protocol, after a prior training phase, drone Alice chooses a trajectory of positions in space and transmits a message to Bob, on the ground, from each position. From the received messages, Bob estimates the channel gain from which a secret key is extracted. The choice of the positions is made to maximize a lower bound on the secret key capacity. Numerical simulations are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.