Methods for Improving the Rate of Secret Key Generation based on Wireless Channel Characteristics

Abstract

Due to non-ideal conditions in the measurements of the wireless channel, high initial bit error rate (BER) in the preliminary key is resulted, which reduces the final secret key generation rate and even causes the secret key generation process fail. Aiming to resolve this problem, we first present and verify an optimal information reconciliation protocol; the validation experiment shows that not only the BER comes down more quickly, but also a higher information rate is achieved. Then, to address the problem of very high initial BER and further improve the efficiency of the secret key generation, we introduce the idea of pre-distillation into the secret key generation system, and present a pre-distillation method, which makes the initial BER comes down quickly, and ensures the subsequent information reconciliation be easily performed; hence the total key generation rate is improved. Experimental results demonstrate that the pre-distillation method has excellent ability of reducing the initial BER, especially in the case of very high initial BER. The combination of our proposed pre-distillation and our optimal information reconciliation is the most efficient one when the initial BER is larger than 0.15, and the information rate is improved by more than forty-nine times when the initial BER is 0.3