Leveraging Millimeter Waves for Security

03/22/2018

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by   Mohammed Karmoose, et al.

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The fact that Millimeter Wave (mmWave) communication needs to be directional is usually perceived as a challenge; in this paper we argue that it enables efficient secret key sharing that are unconditionally secure from passive eavesdroppers, by building on packet erasures. We showcase the potential of our approach in two setups: beam sweeping to align receiver/transmitter pairs, and vehicle platooning. We show that in the first case, we can establish a few hundred secret bits at virtually no additional transmission cost; and in the second case, we can potentially establish keys in the order of tenths of Mbps. These first results are based on some simplifying assumptions, yet we believe they give incentives to further explore such techniques.