A VT-Code-Based Information Reconciliation Scheme for Secret Key Generation Using RSS

Honghai Tang, Guyue Li, Tao Guo, Aiqun Hu

Abstract: Received signal strength (RSS) has been widely used as the channel parameter in physical-layer key generation (PKG). However, the RSS sequences obtained by legitimate users may be misaligned due to sampling deviation and packet loss, resulting in key generation failure. Conventional information reconciliation schemes are not applicable to this misalignment problem. This letter models the misalignment problem as an insertion/deletion problem for the first time and proposes an information reconciliation scheme based on the Varshamov-Tenengolts (VT) code. There are two application modes in our scheme, which are discussed from three aspects. Furthermore, we analytically quantify the information leakage of the scheme. Experimental results show the effectiveness and security of the scheme. When the SNR is 15 dB, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the key disagreement ratio from initially 0.09 to 0.01.