Improving channel reciprocity for effective key management systems

We propose a secret key management system for wireless ad-hoc networks, by utilizing the random and reciprocal variations of the wireless channel. We record the variations of the received signal strength and pre-process it before quantizing. The pre-processing of channel measurements improves the channel reciprocity. The quantized preliminary keys are then synchronized and their privacy is amplified to obtain, a final secure key. We validate the proposed method on an testbed and evaluate its performance. We also compare our method to other existing methods to show a significant improvement in the performance of key generation.