Key Generation Technology Based on Multipath Structure of Underwater Acoustic Channel

The data in the underwater acoustic channel (UAC) can be received through the hydrophone. If there are no encryption protection measures, the enemy can easily obtain sensitive information. According to the requirements of secure transmission of underwater network measurement and control secret information, a key generation method based on UAC response characteristics is proposed. Based on the short-term correlation of UAC, the amplitude and time delay characteristics of underwater acoustic channel multipath structure are extracted, the multi-path number with the strongest energy, the number of qualified sound rays and multipath number with maximum delay difference are quantized to generate the original key. Then, the inconsistent key is corrected by key agreement mechanism. The communication parties can generate encryption key in real time to ensure the confidentiality of information. Experimental results show that the short-term correlation of multi-path structure of UAC is good, which verifies the feasibility of key generation based on multi-path structure of UAC and the key generation scheme proposed in this paper can make the matching probability of underwater acoustic key generation not less than 80%.