Secure phy layer key generation in the asymmetric power line communication channel

Leakage of information in power line communication (PLC) networks is a threat to privacy and security. A way to enhance security is to encode the transmitted information with the use of a secret key. If the communication channel exhibits common characteristics at both ends and these are unknown to a potential eavesdropper, then it is possible to locally generate a common secret key at the two communication ends without the need for sharing it through the broadcast channel. This is known as physical layer key generation. To this aim, known techniques have been developed exploiting the transfer function of symmetric channels. However, the PLC channel is in general not symmetric, but just reciprocal. Therefore, in this paper, we first analyze the characteristics of the channel to verify whether physical layer key generation can be implemented. Then, we propose two novel methods that exploit the reciprocity of the PLC channel to generate common information by the two intended users. This information is processed through different quantization techniques to generate secret keys locally. To assess the security of the generated keys, we analyze the spatial correlation of PLC channels. This allows verifying whether the eavesdropper’s channels are weakly correlated with the intended users’ channel. Consequently, it is found that the information leaked to a possible eavesdropper has very low correlation to the locally generated key. The analysis and proposed methods are validated on a measurement dataset.