Man-in-the-Middle and Denial of Service Attacks in Wireless Secret Key Generation

Abstract: Wireless secret key generation (W-SKG) from shared randomness (e.g., from the wireless channel fading realizations), is a well established scheme that can be used for session key agreement. W-SKG approaches can be of particular interest in delay constrained wireless networks and notably in the context of ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in beyond fifth generation (B5G) systems. However, W-SKG schemes are known to be malleable over the so called "advantage distillation" phase, during which observations of the shared randomness are obtained at the legitimate parties. As an example, an active attacker can act as a man-in-the-middle (MiM) by injecting pilot signals and/or can mount denial of service attacks (DoS) in the form of jamming. This paper investigates the impact of injection and reactive jamming attacks in W-SKG. First, it is demonstrated that injection attacks can be reduced to - potentially less harmful - jamming attacks by pilot randomization; a novel system design with randomized QPSK pilots is presented. Subsequently, the optimal jamming strategy is identified in a block fading additive white Gaussian noise (BF-AWGN) channel in the presence of a reactive jammer, using a game theoretic formulation. It is shown that the impact of a reactive jammer is far more severe than that of a simple proactive jammer