Touch to Pair: Secure and Usable IoT Pairing without Information Loss
Chuxiong Wu, Xiaopeng Li, Lannan Luo, and Qiang Zeng

TL;DR
This paper presents a novel IoT pairing method that is both secure and user-friendly, enabling quick pairing through simple actions without requiring inertial sensors, and introduces a new protocol to prevent information loss.
Contribution
The paper introduces Universal Operation Sensing for sensor-free user operation detection and TimeWall, a secure, accurate pairing protocol avoiding fuzzy commitment.
Findings
Universal Operation Sensing enables quick, sensor-free user actions for pairing.
TimeWall achieves zero information loss and enhances pairing accuracy.
Evaluation confirms security, usability, and efficiency of the proposed methods.
Abstract
Secure pairing is essential for trustworthy deployment and operation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, traditional pairing methods are unsuitable due to the lack of user interfaces such as keyboards. Proximity-based approaches are usable but vulnerable to nearby attackers, while methods relying on physical operations (e.g., shaking) offer higher security but require inertial sensors that most IoT devices lack. We introduceUniversal Operation Sensing, which enables IoT devices to detect user operations without inertial sensors. With this technique, users can complete pairing within seconds through simple actions, such as pressing a button or twisting a knob, using either a smartphone or a smartwatch. We further identify an accuracy issue caused by information loss in the commonly used fuzzy-commitment protocol. To address this issue, we propose TimeWall, an accurate pairing…
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Taxonomy
TopicsIoT and Edge/Fog Computing
