Physical layer secret key generation scheme used in 60 GHz band

The technology of 60 GHz radio is considered promising for providing fast connectivity and gigabit data rate. One of the main challenges to its secure indoor transmission is how to generate secret keys between communication devices. To investigate this issue, The authors develop an efficient mechanism of secret key generation exploiting multipath relative delay based on 60 GHz standard channel models. The comparison of key-mismatch probability between line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments is considered. Verification of the proposed scheme is conducted. Simulation shows that the number of extracted multipath components proportionally did affect key generation rate and key-mismatch probability. It also indicates that communicating transceivers have a slightly lower key-mismatch probability in NLOS condition than in LOS condition. Moreover, in comparison to the existing approach of using received signal amplitude as a common random source, the mechanism can achieve better performance in key agreement.