Secret-Key Generation: Information Theoretic Viewpoint and Application Perspectives

• Applicant: Nima Tavangaran
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404840508

The main goal of this project is to address the physical layer security in the context of practical implementation conditions. In particular, we are interested in enhancing the classical secret-key generation models which are based on discrete memoryless sources into more practical settings. To this end, we will generalize four main application related aspects of these models and derive their secret-key capacities. The first generalization concerns the source uncertainty in which the probability distribution of the source is unknown. It is only assumed that the distribution belongs to an arbitrary known compound set. In this case, the secret-key generation protocol should guarantee security and reliability of the generated secret-key for all sources in the compound set. The second and third generalizations concern time continuity and source memory. Through these extensions, the participants can observe the source in a continuous time manner and each observation might be in general dependent on the previous ones. By means of the last generalization we allow also sources with continuous alphabets. These four extensions of the classical scenarios pave the way to study a very practically relevant model, i.e. secret-key generation using continuous time compound Gaussian sources with memory. In this regard, both single-input single-output and multiple-input multiple-output scenarios can be modeled and studied. These kind of generalizations are not yet intensively studied for secret-key models in literature to date. We believe that the expected results in this project will enrich the knowledge of information theoretic security with practical applications.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor H. Vincent Poor, Ph.D.