Effect of Indoor Radio Propagation on Physical Layer Security Secrecy Key Generation

Physical Layer Security (PLS) is emerging as an innovative solution to enhance the security of wireless communications. This work analyzes the impact of a realistic indoor radio propagation on Secrecy Key Generation (SKG) in a Wi-Fi application scenario. This PLS technique is based on the extraction of raw cryptographic keys, taking advantage of the radio propagation phenomena as a source of entropy. In detail, we considered two legitimate nodes, i.e., Alice and Bob, which use the SKG to extract keys from the channel, and a malicious node, i.e., Eve, which acts as a passive eavesdropper and tries to discover the key. The reported results show that legitimate nodes key mismatch is strongly influenced by noise contribution, and the eavesdropper attack performs better with a higher Line-of-Sight (LoS) contribution. Conversely, when the power is evenly spread over all the multipath components, the eavesdropped key mismatch is maintained in the range of 30 – 50 %.