Title
AEROKEY: Using Ambient Electromagnetic Radiation for Secure and Usable Wireless Device Authentication
Abstract
AbstractWireless connectivity is becoming common in increasingly diverse personal devices, enabling various interoperation- and Internet-based applications and services. More and more interconnected devices are simultaneously operated by a single user with short-lived connections, making usable device authentication methods imperative to ensure both high security and seamless user experience. Unfortunately, current authentication methods that heavily require human involvement, in addition to form factor and mobility constraints, make this balance hard to achieve, often forcing users to choose between security and convenience. In this work, we present a novel over-the-air device authentication scheme named AEROKEY that achieves both high security and high usability. With virtually no hardware overhead, AEROKEY leverages ubiquitously observable ambient electromagnetic radiation to autonomously generate spatiotemporally unique secret that can be derived only by devices that are closely located to each other. Devices can make use of this unique secret to form the basis of a symmetric key, making the authentication procedure more practical, secure and usable with no active human involvement. We propose and implement essential techniques to overcome challenges in realizing AEROKEY on low-cost microcontroller units, such as poor time synchronization, lack of precision analog front-end, and inconsistent sampling rates. Our real-world experiments demonstrate reliable authentication as well as its robustness against various realistic adversaries with low equal-error rates of 3.4% or less and usable authentication time of as low as 24 s.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3517254
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
6
1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kyuin Lee100.68
Yucheng Yang200.34
Omkar Prabhune300.34
Aishwarya Lekshmi Chithra400.34
Jack West500.34
Kassem Fawaz619019.60
Neil Klingensmith701.69
Suman Banerjee84637343.98
Younghyun Kim954051.72