Physical Layer Secret Key Generation Based on Autoencoder for Weakly Correlated Channels

Abstract

The reciprocity of the wireless channel is the basis of the secret key generation on the physical layer as an emerging method for information security enhancement. Due to the duplex mode of communication systems, the channel responses detected by two connected legitimate nodes are not completely reciprocal. In this paper, an efficient physical layer secret key generation scheme is proposed based on an autoencoder to extract reciprocal features from weakly correlated channel estimates. The encoder part after training is equipped at both nodes to generate features for quantization in various channel environments. Simulation results show lower mean squared error (MSE) and better mutual information of the extracted features comparing to the most efficient linear generation method, the principal component analysis (PCA) based one. It reveals the great potential to generate symmetric secret keys with better performance, particularly in low SNR scenarios.