Extract Secrets from Wireless Channel: A New Shape-based Approach

Existing secret key extraction techniques use quantization to map wireless channel amplitudes to secret bits. This pa- per shows that such techniques are highly prone to environ- ment and local noise effects: They have very high mismatch rates between the two nodes that measure the channel be- tween them. This paper advocates using the shape of the channel instead of the size (or amplitude) of the channel. It shows that this new paradigm shift is significantly ro- bust against environmental and local noises. We refer to this shape-based technique as Puzzle. Implementation in a software-defined radio (SDR) platform demonstrates that Puzzle has a 63% reduction in bit mismatch rate than the state-of-art frequency domain approach (CSI-2bit). Exper- iments also show that unlike the state-of-the-art received signal strength (RSS)-based methods like ASBG, Puzzle is robust against an attack in which an eavesdropper can pre- dict the secret bits using planned movements.