Investigating the eavesdropper attack in physical layer security wireless key generation: a simulation case study

In this work we explore the problem of physical layer security key exchange between two communicating devices in wideband wireless networks. We propose to obtain a pair of symmetric keys through a general filtering procedure, which exploits the frequency-selective characteristics of the radio channel. We focus our analysis on the keys bits mismatch with respect to the signal-to-noise-ratio and the link distance, through simulations of realistic radio channels in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. We investigated the impact of a proximity-attack by a malicious third device, founding that it is capable to eavesdrop large parts of the generated key compromising the overall security.