A SKG Security Challenge: Indoor SKG Under an On-The-Shoulder
Eavesdropping Attack
Abstract
Physical layer security (PLS) is seen as the means to enhance physical
layer trustworthiness in 6G. This work provides a proof-of-concept for
one of the most mature PLS technologies, i.e., secret key generation
(SKG) from wireless fading coefficients during the channel’s coherence
time. As opposed to other works, where only specific parts of the
protocol are typically investigated, here, we implement the full SKG
chain in four indoor experimental campaigns. In detail, we consider two
legitimate nodes, who use the wireless channel to extract secret keys
and a malicious node placed in the immediate vicinity of one of them,
who acts as a passive eavesdropper. To estimate the final SKG rate we
evaluate the conditional min-entropy by taking into account all
information available at the eavesdropper. Finally, we use this paper to
announce the first ever physical layer security challenge, mirroring
practices in cryptography. We call the community to scrutinize the
presented results and try to “break” our SKG implementation. To this
end, we provide, i) the full dataset observed by the eavesdroppers, ii)
20 blocks of 16−byte long ciphertexts, encrypted using one-time pad with
20 distilled secret keys, and, iii) all codes and software used in our
SKG implementation. An attack will be considered successful if any
part(s) of the plaintext are successfully retrieved.