Unification of Secret Key Generation and Wiretap Channel Transmission

This paper presents further insights into a recently developed round-trip communication scheme called “Secret-message Transmission by Echoing Encrypted Probes (STEEP)”. A legitimate wireless channel between a multi-antenna user (Alice) and a single-antenna user (Bob) in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper (Eve) is focused on. STEEP does not require full-duplex, channel reciprocity or Eve's channel state information, but is able to yield a positive secrecy rate in bits per channel use between Alice and Bob in every channel coherence period as long as Eve's receive channel is not noiseless. This secrecy rate does not diminish as coherence time increases. Various statistical behaviors of STEEP's secrecy capacity due to random channel fading are also illustrated.