Physical Layer Security against an Informed Eavesdropper in Underwater Acoustic Channels: Reconciliation and Privacy Amplification

Abstract

We propose a strategy for generating the same crypto-key between two trusted underwater acoustic nodes (Alice and Bob) without revealing it to an eavesdropper (Eve). Our work builds upon the results of [1] where a methodology for generating a string of bits for Alice, Bob and Eve based on channel feature extraction and quantization is discussed. In this paper, we aim to reconcile the respective bits of Alice and Bob while minimizing the information leaked to Eve. To this end, we examine various Reed Solomon (RS) codes and measure the reconciliation rate of Alice, Bob and Eve. Additionally, we propose the Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3) as means to eliminate any information that Eve acquires during reconciliation. We evaluate our reconciliation and privacy amplification strategies with bits generated from real underwater acoustic channel probe exchanges between Alice and Bob and Bellhop-simulated channels for Eve. Our analysis confirms that appropriate combinations of channel features and RS codes lead to a computationally secure generation of a 256-bit crypto-key according to the principles of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), even if Eve is informed about the RS encoder and the SHA-3 function.