The activity is within a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 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 behavior of underwater acoustic channel.

Required skills: Basics of probability and signal processing for communications. Matlab and Python programming languages.

Languages (write/speak): Italian or English

Period: Open

Support: 400 €/month for 6 months.

University contact: Prof. Stefano Tomasin (stefano.tomasin@unipd.it)

Restrictions. this project is available only for students having one of the following nationalities: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Afghanistan*, Algeria*, Armenia*, Azerbaijan*, Belarus*, Bosnia and Herzegovina*, Egypt*, Georgia*, Iraq*, Jordan*, Kazakhstan*, Kyrgyz Republic*, Mauritania*, Moldova*, Mongolia*, Montenegro*, Morocco*, Pakistan*, Serbia*, Tajikistan*, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia†*, Tunisia*, Turkmenistan*, Ukraine*, Uzbekistan*.