Secret-Key Agreement Capacity over Reciprocal Fading Channels: A Separation Approach

Abstract: Fundamental limits of secret-key agreement over reciprocal wireless channels are investigated. We consider a two-way block-fading channel where the channel gains in the forward and reverse links between the legitimate terminals are correlated. The channel gains between the legitimate terminals are not revealed to any terminal, whereas the channel gains of the eavesdropper are revealed to the eavesdropper. We propose a two-phase transmission scheme, that reserves a certain portion of each coherence block for channel estimation, and the remainder of the coherence block for correlated source generation. The resulting secret-key involves contributions of both channel sequences and source sequences, with the contribution of the latter becoming dominant as the coherence period increases. We also establish an upper bound on the secret-key capacity, which has a form structurally similar to the lower bound. Our upper and lower bounds coincide in the limit of high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) and large coherence period, thus establishing the secret-key agreement capacity in this asymptotic regime. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves significant gains over training-only schemes, even for moderate SNR and small coherence periods, thus implying the necessity of randomness-sharing in practical secret-key generation systems.