Vibration-based Key Exchange among Multiple Smart Devices on the Desk

Abstract Eavesdropping is an important and real concern in mobile NFC (Near Filed Communication) payment and data sharing applications. Although the DH (Diffie-Hellman) scheme has been widely used in key exchange for secure communications, it may fail in indoor environments due to its vulnerability against man-in-the-middle attack. In this paper, we propose a new vibration-based key exchange among multiple smart devices which are placed on a desk. In this scheme, devices are assumed to be located next to each other with each of them vibrating with patterns converted from a key to be exchanged. The vibration patterns are measured by an accelerometer and each key is recovered from the measured acceleration. The proposed scheme has been implemented using Android smartphones and various experimental performance evaluation results have validated its effectiveness.