Mimicking DH Key Exchange Over a Full Duplex Wireless Channel via Bisparse Blind Deconvolution

Secret key generation between authenticated devices is a pivotal task for secure communications. Diffie-Hellman (DH) is de-facto standard but not post-quantum secure. In this paper, we shall invent and analyze a new security primitive that is specifically designed for WPAN. For WPAN, wireless channel-based secret key generation has been proposed but was not widely deployed due to its critical dependence on the channel’s entropy which is uncontrollable. We formulate a different approach: We still exploit channel properties but mainly hinge on the reciprocity of the wireless channel and not on the channel’s entropy. The radio advantage comes from the use of full duplex communication. We show that in this situation both legitimate parties can agree on a common secret key even without ever probing the channel. At the core is a new bisparse blind deconvolution scheme for which we prove correctness and information-theoretic, i.e. perfect, security. We show that, ultimately, a secret key can be extracted and give a lower bound for the number of secret key bits which is then verified by experiments. We also notice a remote correspondence of the scheme to DH key exchange.