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

Acoustic Integrity Codes: Secure Device Pairing Using Short-Range Acoustic Communication

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) relies on an out-of-band channel to authenticate devices. This requires a common hardware interface, which limits the use of existing SDP systems. We propose to use short-range acoustic communication for the initial pairing. Audio hardware is commonly available on existing off-the-shelf devices and can be accessed from user space without requiring firmware or hardware modifications. We improve upon previous approaches by designing Acoustic Integrity Codes (AICs): a modulation scheme that provides message authentication on the acoustic physical layer. We analyze their security and demonstrate that we can defend against signal cancellation attacks by designing signals with low autocorrelation. Our system can detect overshadowing attacks using a ternary decision function with a threshold. In our evaluation of this SDP scheme's security and robustness, we achieve a bit error ratio below 0.1% for a net bit rate of 100 bps with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 14 dB. Using our open-source proof-of-concept implementation on Android smartphones, we demonstrate pairing between different smartphone models.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures. Published at ACM WiSec 2020 (13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks). Updated reference

Secure Mobile Social Networks using USIM in a Closed Environment

Online social networking and corresponding mobile based applications are gaining popularity and now considered a well-integrated service within mobile devices. Basic security mechanisms normally based on passwords for the authentication of social-network users are widely deployed and poses a threat for the user security. In particular, for dedicated social groups with high confidentiality and privacy demands, stronger and user friendly principles for the authentication and identification of group members are needed. On the other hand, most of the mobile units already provide strong authentication procedures through the USIM/ISIM module. This paper explores how to build an architectural framework for secure enrollment and identification of group members in dedicated closed social groups using the USIM/SIM authentication and in particular, the 3GPP Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA), which is built upon the USIM/SIM capabilities. One part of the research is to identify the marketable use-cases with corresponding security challenges to fulfill the requirements that extend beyond the online connectivity. This paper proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have also implemented an initial proof of the concept prototype to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. Our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for applications requiring secure identification

ivPair: context-based fast intra-vehicle device pairing for secure wireless connectivity

The emergence of advanced in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, calls for fast and intuitive device pairing mechanisms to discover newly introduced devices and make or break a secure, high-bandwidth wireless connection. Current pairing schemes are tedious and lengthy as they typically require users to go through pairing and verification procedures by manually entering a predetermined or randomly generated pin on both devices. This inconvenience usually results in prolonged usage of old pins, significantly degrading the security of network connections. To address this challenge, we propose ivPair, a secure and usable device pairing protocol that extracts an identical pairing pin or fingerprint from vehicle\u27s vibration response caused by various factors such as driver\u27s driving pattern, vehicle type, and road conditions. Using ivPair, users can pair a mobile device equipped with an accelerometer with the vehicle\u27s IVI system or other mobile devices by simply holding it against the vehicle\u27s interior frame. Under realistic driving experiments with various types of vehicles and road conditions, we demonstrate that all passenger-owned devices can expect a high pairing success rate with a short pairing time, while effectively rejecting proximate adversaries attempting to pair with the target vehicle

Shake well before use: Authentication based on Accelerometer Data

Small, mobile devices without user interfaces, such as Bluetooth headsets, often need to communicate securely over wireless networks. Active attacks can only be prevented by authenticating wireless communication, which is problematic when devices do not have any a priori information about each other. We introduce a new method for device-to-device authentication by shaking devices together. This paper describes two protocols for combining cryptographic authentication techniques with known methods of accelerometer data analysis to the effect of generating authenticated, secret keys. The protocols differ in their design, one being more conservative from a security point of view, while the other allows more dynamic interactions. Three experiments are used to optimize and validate our proposed authentication method

Detecting (Absent) App-to-app authentication on cross-device short-distance channels

Short-distance or near-field communication is increasingly used by mobile apps for interacting or exchanging data in a cross-device fashion. In this paper, we identify a security issue, namely cross-device app-to-app communication hijacking (or CATCH), that affect Android apps using short-distance channels (e.g., Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-Direct). This issue causes unauthenticated or malicious app-to-app interactions even when the underlying communication channels are authenticated and secured. In addition to discovering the security issue, we design an algorithm based on data-flow analysis for detecting the presence of CATCH in Android apps. Our algorithm checks if a given app contains an app-to-app authentication scheme, necessary for preventing CATCH. We perform experiments on a set of Android apps and show the CATCH problem is always present on the whole analyzed applications set. We also discuss the impact of the problem in real scenarios by presenting two real case studies. At the end of the paper we reported limitations of our model along with future improvements