Energy harvesting in secret key generation systems under jamming attacks

Secret key generation (SKG) from shared randomness at two remote locations has been shown to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks in the form of jamming. Typically, such attacks are alleviated with frequency hopping/spreading techniques that rely on expansion of the system bandwidth. In the present study, energy harvesting (EH) is exploited as a novel counter-jamming approach that alleviates the need for extra bandwidth resources. Assuming the legitimate users have EH capabilities, the idea is that part of the jamming signal can potentially be harvested and converted into useful communication power. In this framework, the competitive interaction between a pair of legitimate users and a jammer is formulated as a zero-sum game. A critical transmission power for the legitimate users is identified which allows to completely characterize the unique NE of the game in closed form. Remarkably, this threshold also provides the option to effectively neutralize the jammer, i.e., prevent the jammer from carrying out the attack altogether. Through numerical evaluations, EH is shown to be a counter-jamming approach that can offer substantial gains in terms of relative SKG rates.