In this paper, we propose a new security design, called as Zero Reconciliation Secret Key Extraction, for backscatter wireless systems, in which a reader needs to establish secret keys for multiple tags. Our design is able to eliminate the reconciliation process in conventional physical layer based key establishment, therefore improving the efficiency while still maintaining security in such a process. The essence in our design is to use a channel state information (CSI) characteristic, named CSI Ratio, at the reader to differentiate multiple tags, then employ multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding for legitimate tags to effectively and securely establish secret keys, at the same time leveraging artificial jamming to forestall eavesdropping attacks in the network. We evaluate our design with real-world experimental data and show that the proposed approach can achieve relatively high secret key extraction rates and maintain low bit error rates.
['Shichao Lv', 'Xiang Lu', 'Zhuo Lu', 'Xiaoshan Wang', 'Ning Wang', 'Limin Sun']
Zero reconciliation secret key extraction in MIMO backscatter wireless systems