The activity is within a NATO research project on security for underwater acoustic communications.

The student will study techniques for establishing a secret key, i.e., a sequence of bits shared by communications between two devices and not disclosed to an eavesdropping device.

The solution will be based on the estimation of the communication channel between the two legitimate devices that will operate as a unique signature of their link, not known to the eavesdropper. Information theoretic tools will be used to tackle the problem.

The internship and final project activity will

a) investigate the characteristics of the underwater acoustic communication channel that can be used for key agreement,

b) design techniques to obtain the secret key, based on information theoretic approaches, and

c) simulate the key agreement procedure with suitable tools that describe the behaviour of underwater acoustic channel.