A multi-eavesdropper scheme against RIS secured LoS-dominated channel

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been shown as a promising technique to increase the channel randomness for secret key generation (SKG) in low-entropy channels (e.g., static or line-of-sight (LoS)), without small-scale fading. In this letter, we show that even with the aid of RIS, collaborative eavesdroppers (Eves) can still estimate the legitimate Alice-Bob channel and erode their secret key rates (SKRs), since the RIS induced randomness is also reflected in the Eves’ observations. Conditioned on Eves’ observations, if the entropy of RIS-combined legitimate channel is zero, Eves are able to estimate it and its secret key. Leveraging this, we design a multi-Eve scheme against the RIS-secured LoS dominated scenarios, by using the multiple Eves’ observations to reconstruct the RIS-combined legitimate channel. We further deduce a closed-form secret key leakage rate under our designed multi-Eve scheme, and demonstrate the results via simulations.