MARKS-Cryptography

Electromagnetism can also be used to hide information.

A novel paradigm that is gaining interest in the wireless community is the possibility to extract information both at the transmitter and at the receiver from the estimation of the common channel parameters., taking advantage of the fact that multipath propagation provides an amount of random data that can be easily recovered by the transmitter and the receiver, but is difficult to obtain for an eavesdropper.

The possibility to share a common key between two terminals is very attractive in many contexts. For instance, in Wi-Fi hotspots or in vehicle-to-vehicle communications, it could be possible to achieve a secure point-to-point connection with no previous key establishment that in some cases could be impractical.

MARKS (Multi-Antenna Receiver Key Sharing) is a system that allows to share a secret key in a wireless communication systems. MARKS takes advantage of low-cost parasitic reconfigurable antennas specifically optimized to extract random sequences from the electromagnetic communication channel.

A prototype of MARK employing antenna particularly suitable for low-cost wireless communication systems is currently under development.

Furrther information can be found in:

• D. Pinchera, M.D. Migliore, “Effectively Exploiting Parasitic Arrays for Secret Key Sharing“

published on IEEE Trans. On Vehicular Technology, Vol 65, n. 1, 2016, pp, 123-131 , doi 10.1109/TVT.2015.2391294

• D. Pinchera, M.D. Migliore, “Secret key sharing by means of reconfigurable antenna systems”

presented at the 2014 International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology (ICCST), DOI: 10.1109/CCST.2014.6986989

• D.Pinchera, M. D. Migliore, “A Simple Procedure for Effettive Secret Key Sharing from Wireless Channel Estimation”,

presented at APS/URSI Int. Symp, Orlando, 7-13 July 2013, pp. 554-557