While the literature on channel state information (CSI)-based authentication and key
distillation is vast, the two topics have customarily been studied separately. This paper
proposes unsupervised learning techniques to disentangle deterministic from stochastic
fading to decompose observed CSI vectors into “predictable” and “unpredictable”
components. The former, primarily due to large-scale fading, can be used for node
authentication. The latter, primarily due to small-scale fading, can be used for secret key …

While the literature on RF fingerprinting-based authentication and key distillation is vast, the
two topics have customarily been studied separately. In this paper, starting from the
observation that the wireless channel is a composite, deterministic/stochastic process, we
propose a power domain decomposition that allows performing the two tasks
simultaneously. We devise intelligent pre-processing schemes to decompose channel state
information (CSI) observation vectors into “predictable''and “unpredictable''components. The …