Noisy Vibrational Pairing of IoT Devices
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abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) is embodied by smart network-enabled devices that utilize computing power, networking, and miniaturization to enable richer and improved user experience. Due to their interconnectedness, ubiquitous nature and low computational power, trustworthy and secure communication between IoT devices has become a security concern. To authenticate the devices, pairing may be secured by the use of an auxiliary channel such as audio, visual and vibrations for sharing the key or keying material between the IoT devices. In this paper, we evaluate the security of vibration channel, susceptible to an acoustic eavesdropper, that can capture audio leakage from the vibrations of the transmitting IoT device. We propose a noisy vibration scheme for cloaking vibration sounds during pairing against such attacks. The scheme only requires a speaker for emitting the masking sound during key transmission. We evaluate the scheme in proximity, co-located and remote settings with an eavesdropping attacker. We also study motion sensor exploits against this scheme and compliment it with additional measures to mask vibration effects on motion sensors. Our scheme is user transparent and requires only a speaker (that may already be present on the device), so it can be readily implemented in the IoT setting, smart wearables, and other commodity gadgets.
