Secret key generation based on channel characteristics is an effective physical-layer security method for 5G wireless networks. The issues of how to ensure the high key generation rate and correlation of the secret key under active attack are needed to be addressed. In this paper, a new practical secret key generation scheme with high rate and correlation is proposed. In our proposed scheme, Alice and Bob transmit independent random sequences instead of known training sequences or probing signals; neither Alice nor Bob can decode these random sequences or estimate the channel. User's random sequences together with the channel effects are used as common random source to generate the secret key. With this solution, legitimate users are able to share secret keys with sufficient length and high security under active attack. We evaluate the proposed scheme through both analytic and simulation studies. The results show that our proposed scheme achieves high key generation rate and key security, and is suitable for 5G wireless networks with resource-constrained devices.

We investigate the secret key agreement from correlated Gaussian sources in which the legitimate parties can use the public communication with limited rate. For the class of protocols with the one-way public communication, we show a closed form expression of the optimal trade-off between the rate of key generation and the rate of the public communication. Our results clarify an essential difference between the key agreement from discrete sources and that from continuous sources.

Privacy amplification is a technique to distill a secret key from a random variable by a function so that the distilled key and eavesdropper's random variable are statistically independent. There are three kinds of security criteria for the key distilled by privacy amplification: the normalized divergence criterion, which is also known as the weak security criterion, the variational distance criterion, and the divergence criterion, which is also known as the strong security criterion. As a technique to distill a secret key, it is known that the encoder of a Slepian-Wolf (the source coding with full side-information at the decoder) code can be used as a function for privacy amplification if we employ the weak security criterion. In this paper, we show that the encoder of a Slepian-Wolf code cannot be used as a function for privacy amplification if we employ the criteria other than the weak one.

We consider the problem of secret key agreement in Gaussian Maurer's Model. In Gaussian Maurer's model, legitimate receivers, Alice and Bob, and a wire-tapper, Eve, receive signals randomly generated by a satellite through three independent memoryless Gaussian channels respectively. Then Alice and Bob generate a common secret key from their received signals. In this model, we propose a protocol for generating a common secret key by using the result of soft-decision of Alice and Bob's received signals. Then, we calculate a lower bound on the secret key rate in our proposed protocol. As a result of comparison with the protocol that only uses hard-decision, we found that the higher rate is obtained by using our protocol.