On the Use of CSI for the Generation of RF Fingerprints and Secret Keys

Abstract: This paper presents a systematic approach to use channel state information for authentication and secret key distillation for physical layer security (PLS). We use popular ML methods and signal processing-based approaches to disentangle the large scale fading and be used as a source of uniqueness, from the small scale fading, to be treated as a source of shared entropy secret key generation (SKG). The ML-based approaches are completely unsupervised and hence avoid exhaustive measurement campaigns. We also propose using the Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC); our simulation results demonstrate that the extracted stochastic part of the channel state information (CSI) vectors are statistically independent.