Channel-Based Key Generation for Secure Underwater Acoustic Communications

To protect underwater acoustic communications from interception, the exchange of encryption keys is necessary. Since underwater devices can be compromised, generating keys on site is a better option than predefined keys. In this paper, we present a solution that utilizes the characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel impulse response (CIR), which is highly variable in both space and time, while ensuring consistency between the communicating nodes (Alice and Bob). To compensate for temporal variations, the key is calculated from the CIR feature’s distribution parameters, while the hard key is determined using a K-means strategy. To achieve key agreement, we exploit the long propagation delay in the underwater CIR and let Alice and Bob transmit simultaneously while their packets fly past each other. Due to the channel’s reciprocity, this simultaneous transmission ensures that the same CIR is estimated at both ends of the communication link. Simulation and sea experiment results show that it is possible to extract at least three times as many secret bits as we would with a uniform quantizer. The results show a high matching rate between Alice and Bob and a high Hamming distance to Eve’s key. For reproducibility, we share the CIRs from the sea trials.