Physical Layer Security: Secret Key Generation and a New Approach

Physical layer security methods provide an alternative to conventional encryption schemes in order to ensure security in wireless networks. These methods are often keyless and exploit the physical properties of the wireless link for secure communication. Alternatively, these methods can be deployed to exchange secret keys between the network nodes in order to complement the higher layer encryption schemes. In the first part of this talk, an efficient and low complexity method for fast secret key generation in wireless networks is discussed. In the second part, we describe a novel approach to implement physical layer security methods by exploiting coupling dynamics between antenna front-end of wireless users.

Hessam Mahdavifar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received the B.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2007, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA, in 2009, and 2012, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. He was with the Samsung Mobile Solutions Lab between 2012 and 2016. His general research interests are in coding theory, information theory, and security with applications in wireless communications, data storage, and IoT. He has won several awards including the Best Paper Award in the 2015 IEEE International Conference on RFID, the UCSD Shannon Memorial Fellowship, and two Silver Medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.