Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time, enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99

Green multimedia: informing people of their carbon footprint through two simple sensors

In this work we discuss a new, but highly relevant, topic to the multimedia community; systems to inform individuals of their carbon footprint, which could ultimately effect change in community carbon footprint-related activities. The reduction of carbon emissions is now an important policy driver of many governments, and one of the major areas of focus is in reducing the energy demand from the consumers i.e. all of us individually. In terms of CO2 generated from energy consumption, there are three predominant factors, namely electricity usage, thermal related costs, and transport usage. Standard home electricity and heating sensors can be used to measure the former two aspects, and in this paper we evaluate a novel technique to estimate an individual's transport-related carbon emissions through the use of a simple wearable accelerometer. We investigate how providing this novel estimation of transport-related carbon emissions through an interactive web site and mobile phone app engages a set of users in becoming more aware of their carbon emissions. Our evaluations involve a group of 6 users collecting 25 million accelerometer readings and 12.5 million power readings vs. a control group of 16 users collecting 29.7 million power readings

Orientation Based Accelerometer Analysis (OBAA) for Mobile Gestures: Memorable Authentication

Mobile authentication today primarily relies onPersonal Identification Numbers (PINs). For PINs to be securefrom the majority of malicious users, it must contain a highnumber of digits and be entropic. Human memory generallystruggles when it attempts to recall highly entropic numericcodes. Gesture-based authentication using Quick Reference (QR)codes, and internally analyzed accelerometer data from mobiledevices, allow for sustaining a more user-friendly, memorable,and low expense alternative to PINs. This paper presents atechnique for users to capture movements of their mobile deviceby analyzing the orientation of devices and the speed at whichthese orientations transition via accelerometer data. Thesemotions are described as the user’s gesture. Gestures can be usedto identify a user, while QR codes can be used to indicate aspecific machine a user can attempt to authenticate with. A userstudy was performed and showed gesture-based authenticationresults in a more user preferred, entropic and memorableauthentication system in comparison to similar applications