Channel Identification: Secret Sharing using Reciprocity in Ultrawideband Channels

To establish a secure communications link between any two transceivers, the communicating parties require some shared secret, or key, with which to encrypt the message so that it cannot be understood by an enemy observer. Using the theory of reciprocity for antennas and electromagnetic propagation, a key distribution method is proposed that uses the ultrawideband channel pulse response between two transceivers as a source of common randomness that is not available to enemy observers in other locations. The maximum size of a key that can be shared in this way is characterized by the mutual information between the observations of two radios, and an approximation on mutual information is found for a general multipath channel and examples given for UWB channel models. Simulation results of key lengths achieved using the proposed key sharing techniques over some ultrawideband channel models are presented.