WiMorse: a contactless Morse code text input system using ambient WiFi signals

International audienceRecent years have witnessed advances of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and their applications to enable contactless sensing and human-computer interaction in smart homes. For people with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), their motion capabilities are severely impaired and they have difficulties interacting with IoT devices and even communicating with other people. As the disease progresses, most patients lose their speech function eventually which makes the widely adopted voice-based solutions fail. In contrast, most patients can still move their fingers slightly even after they have lost the control of their arms and hands. Thus we propose to develop a Morse code based text input system, called WiMorse, which allows patients with minimal single-finger control to input and communicate with other people without attaching any sensor to their fingers. WiMorse leverages ubiquitous commodity WiFi devices to track subtle finger movements contactlessly and encode them as Morse code input. In order to sense the very subtle finger movements, we propose to employ the ratio of the Channel State Information (CSI) between two antennas to enhance the Signal to Noise Ratio. To address the severe location dependency issue in wireless sensing with accurate theoretical underpinning and experiments, we propose a signal transformation mechanism to automatically convert signals based on the input position, achieving stable sensing performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that WiMorse can achieve higher than 95% recognition accuracy for finger generated Morse code, and is robust against input position, environment changes, and user diversity

Adaptive Control of IoT/M2M Devices in Smart Buildings using Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) are becoming essential for many applications. One of the most emblematic IoT/M2M applications is smart buildings. The current Building Automation Systems (BAS) are limited by many factors, including the lack of integration of IoT and M2M technologies, unfriendly user interfacing, and the lack of a convergent solution. Therefore, this paper proposes a better approach of using heterogeneous wireless networks consisting of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Mobile Cellular Networks (MCNs) for IoT/M2M smart building systems. One of the most significant outcomes of this research is to provide accurate readings to the server, and very low latency, through which users can easily control and monitor remotely the proposed system that consists of several innovative services, namely smart parking, garden irrigation automation, intrusion alarm, smart door, fire and gas detection, smart lighting, smart medication reminder, and indoor air quality monitoring. All these services are designed and implemented to control and monitor from afar the building via our free mobile application named Raniso which is a local server that allows remote control of the building. This IoT/M2M smart building system is customizable to meet the needs of users, improving safety and quality of life while reducing energy consumption. Additionally, it helps prevent the loss of resources and human lives by detecting and managing risks.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Sensors Journa

Continuous Authentication for Voice Assistants

Voice has become an increasingly popular User Interaction (UI) channel, mainly contributing to the ongoing trend of wearables, smart vehicles, and home automation systems. Voice assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Cortana, have become our everyday fixtures, especially in scenarios where touch interfaces are inconvenient or even dangerous to use, such as driving or exercising. Nevertheless, the open nature of the voice channel makes voice assistants difficult to secure and exposed to various attacks as demonstrated by security researchers. In this paper, we present VAuth, the first system that provides continuous and usable authentication for voice assistants. We design VAuth to fit in various widely-adopted wearable devices, such as eyeglasses, earphones/buds and necklaces, where it collects the body-surface vibrations of the user and matches it with the speech signal received by the voice assistant's microphone. VAuth guarantees that the voice assistant executes only the commands that originate from the voice of the owner. We have evaluated VAuth with 18 users and 30 voice commands and find it to achieve an almost perfect matching accuracy with less than 0.1% false positive rate, regardless of VAuth's position on the body and the user's language, accent or mobility. VAuth successfully thwarts different practical attacks, such as replayed attacks, mangled voice attacks, or impersonation attacks. It also has low energy and latency overheads and is compatible with most existing voice assistants

Privacy-aware Security Applications in the Era of Internet of Things

In this dissertation, we introduce several novel privacy-aware security applications. We split these contributions into three main categories: First, to strengthen the current authentication mechanisms, we designed two novel privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication mechanisms, Continuous Authentication (CA) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). Our first system is Wearable-assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA), where we used the sensor data collected from a wrist-worn device to authenticate users continuously. Then, we improved WACA by integrating a noise-tolerant template matching technique called NTT-Sec to make it privacy-aware as the collected data can be sensitive. We also designed a novel, lightweight, Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication (PACA) protocol. PACA is easily applicable to other biometric authentication mechanisms when feature vectors are represented as fixed-length real-valued vectors. In addition to CA, we also introduced a privacy-aware multi-factor authentication method, called PINTA. In PINTA, we used fuzzy hashing and homomorphic encryption mechanisms to protect the users\u27 sensitive profiles while providing privacy-preserving authentication. For the second privacy-aware contribution, we designed a multi-stage privacy attack to smart home users using the wireless network traffic generated during the communication of the devices. The attack works even on the encrypted data as it is only using the metadata of the network traffic. Moreover, we also designed a novel solution based on the generation of spoofed traffic. Finally, we introduced two privacy-aware secure data exchange mechanisms, which allow sharing the data between multiple parties (e.g., companies, hospitals) while preserving the privacy of the individual in the dataset. These mechanisms were realized with the combination of Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) and Differential Privacy (DP) techniques. In addition, we designed a policy language, called Curie Policy Language (CPL), to handle the conflicting relationships among parties. The novel methods, attacks, and countermeasures in this dissertation were verified with theoretical analysis and extensive experiments with real devices and users. We believe that the research in this dissertation has far-reaching implications on privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication methods, smart home user privacy research, as well as the privacy-aware and secure data exchange methods

Clothing-Integrated Human-Technology Interaction

Due to the different disabilities of people and versatile use environments, the current handheld and screen-based digital devices on the market are not suitable for all consumers and all situations. Thus, there is an urgent need for human- technology interaction solutions, where the required input actions to digital devices are simple, easy to establish, and instinctive, allowing the whole society to effortlessly interact with the surrounding technology. In passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, the tag consists only of an antenna and a simple integrated circuit (IC). The tag gets all the needed power from the RFID reader and can be thus seamlessly and in a maintenance-free way integrated into clothing. In this thesis, it is presented that by integrating passive UHF RFID technology into clothing, body movements and gestures can be monitored by monitoring the individual IDs and backscattered signals of the tags. Electro-textiles and embroidery with conductive thread are found to be suitable options when manufacturing and materials for such garments are considered. This thesis establishes several RFID- based interface solutions, multiple types of inputs through RFID platforms, and controlling the surrounding and communicating with RFID-based on/off functions. The developed intelligent clothing is visioned to provide versatile applications for assistive technology, for entertainment, and ambient assistant living, and for comfort and safety in work environments, just to name a few examples

RotoSwype : word-gesture typing using a ring

Funding: NSERC Discovery Grant #2018-05187, the Canada Foundation for Innovation Infrastructure Fund “Facility for Fully Interactive Physio-digital Spaces” (#33151), and Ontario Early Researcher Award #ER16-12-184.We propose RotoSwype, a technique for word-gesture typing using the orientation of a ring worn on the index finger. RotoSwype enables one-handed text-input without encumbering the hand with a device, a desirable quality in many scenarios, including virtual or augmented reality. The method is evaluated using two arm positions: with the hand raised up with the palm parallel to the ground; and with the hand resting at the side with the palm facing the body. A five-day study finds both hand positions achieved speeds of at least 14 words-per-minute (WPM) with uncorrected error rates near 1%, outperforming previous comparable techniques.Postprin