Secret Key Generation on Aerial Rician Fading Channels Against a Curious Receiver

Mattia Piana; Stefano Tomasin

doi:10.1109/spawc66079.2025.11143442

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arXiv · 2512.04756

Secret Key Generation on Aerial Rician Fading Channels Against a Curious Receiver

Mattia Piana·Stefano Tomasin

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Abstract

Secret key generation at the physical layer is expected to be a fundamental enabler for next-generation networks. We consider a network where the user equipment is a drone and propose a novel secret key generation solution when the eavesdropper is another node belonging to the network (curious device). We exploit drone mobility over realistic Rician fading channels. In our protocol, after a prior training phase, drone Alice chooses a trajectory of positions in space and transmits a message to Bob, on the ground, from each position. From the received messages, Bob estimates the channel gain from which a secret key is extracted. The choice of the positions is made to maximize a lower bound on the secret key capacity. Numerical simulations are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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Mattia Piana, Stefano Tomasin. 2025-12-04. Secret Key Generation on Aerial Rician Fading Channels Against a Curious Receiver. https://doi.org/10.1109/spawc66079.2025.11143442

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