Survey on channel reciprocity based key establishment techniques for wireless systems

Channel reciprocity based key establishment techniques have attracted more and more attention from the wireless security research community for its easy implementation, low computational requirement, and small energy consumption. The basic idea of these techniques is to establish a shared key by utilizing the wireless channel reciprocity, i.e., the transmitter and receiver of one wireless link can observe the same channel simultaneously. In this survey, we reviewed different types of existing techniques based on (1) how they quantize the wireless channel reciprocity into binary bits to form a secret key; (2) how they handle communication errors to achieve the key agreement between the transmitter and the receiver; and (3) the feasibility and security issues related to these techniques. This survey attempts to summarize the emerging research on channel reciprocity based key establishment, which may provide insights for us to identify wireless security problems and propose comprehensive defenses.