Securing M2M Transmissions Using Nonreconciled Secret Keys Generated from Wireless Channels

Abstract

Wireless secret key generation exploits unpredictable multi-path features from wireless channel to achieve high secure key bits. Most of the existing wireless secret key generation methods require information reconciliation process to correct discrepant key bits between the keying parties, which reveals information to the eavesdroppers and increases the system complexity. This paper introduces an integrated wireless secret key based transmission (WSKT) scheme for machine to machine (M2M) communications, using nonreconciled key bits generated from wireless channels without information reconciliation but sharing the error correction capability of channel coding. Polar code and stream encryption are employed to achieve secure communication. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed WSKT can achieve secure M2M communications which only causes a slight degradation on the system performance.