Biblio

This paper considers the transmission of confidential data over wireless channels. Based on an information-theoretic formulation of the problem, in which two legitimates partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through a second independent quasi-static fading channel, the important role of fading is characterized in terms of average secure communication rates and outage probability. Based on the insights from this analysis, a practical secure communication protocol is developed, which uses a four-step procedure to ensure wireless information-theoretic security: (i) common randomness via opportunistic transmission, (ii) message reconciliation, (iii) common key generation via privacy amplification, and (iv) message protection with a secret key. A reconciliation procedure based on multilevel coding and optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is introduced, which allows to achieve communication rates close to the fundamental security limits in several relevant instances. Finally, a set of metrics for assessing average secure key generation rates is established, and it is shown that the protocol is effective in secure key renewal-even in the presence of imperfect channel state information.

The Energy Internet is an advanced smart grid solution to increase energy efficiency by jointly operating multiple energy resources via the Internet. However, such an increasing integration of energy resources requires secure and efficient communication in the Energy Internet. To address such a requirement, we propose a new secure key bootstrapping protocol to support the integration and operation of energy resources. By using a universal composability model that provides a strong security notion for designing and analyzing cryptographic protocols, we define an ideal functionality that supports several cryptographic primitives used in this paper. Furthermore, we provide an ideal functionality for key bootstrapping and secure communication, which allows exchanged session keys to be used for secure communication in an ideal manner. We propose the first secure key bootstrapping protocol that enables a user to verify the identities of other users before key bootstrapping. We also present a secure communication protocol for unicast and multicast communications. The ideal functionalities help in the design and analysis of the proposed protocols. We perform some experiments to validate the performance of our protocols, and the results show that our protocols are superior to the existing related protocols and are suitable for the Energy Internet. As a proof of concept, we apply our functionalities to a practical key bootstrapping protocol, namely generic bootstrapping architecture.