Reed Solomon Codes for the reconciliation of wireless PHY layer based secret keys

Abstract

This paper proposes a key reconciliation mechanism using Reed Solomon code to improve the effectiveness of secret key generation based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) variations in a wireless channel between two communicating parties. We use a two threshold quantization algorithm which can operate as a lossless system improving the secret bit extraction rate. We present our Reed Solomon (RS) code based algorithm for reconciling the independently derived secret keys through sharing of only the syndrome bits. We evaluate our reconciliation algorithm using simulated channel measurements and real environment data gathered between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a controller in a semi mobile environment. We show that by selecting appropriate parameters of the RS code, it is possible to generate matching keys at the transmitter and the receiver which can be used to secure the communication at wireless PHY or upper layers.