Device authentication in wireless Ad-Hoc networks by shaking

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a method to establish a secure communication session between two devices in an ad-hoc wireless network by means of shaking the devices together. This is a task which is easy to perform hut difficult to replicate by an attacker With the quantum leap in technology, electronic devices are becoming more compact and miniaturized The increase in demand for user friendliness and mobility has caused the devices to employ wireless technologies giving rise to security threats. To counteract security threats such as man in the middle (MITM) attacks and eavesdropping, authentication methods and cryptography are used, Networks with huge numbers of wireless sensors are gaining in popularity for many applications ranging from military to the environment. These devices are characterized by primitive or non-existent user interfaces. The proposed technique is targeted at such devices. The features extracted from the acceleration profiles of the shaken devices are used in deriving a suitable authentication key. The extracted features are used as an input to a suitable cryptographic protocol in order to derive parameters which will be accommodated by an authentication protocol. The paper presents the development, implementation and the evaluation of the proposed concept.