Design and Implementation of Robust, Secure, Simple Bluetooth Pairing using Physical Vibration

Abstract

Short-range wireless communications technology is increasingly employed for communication among electronic devices. As a result, the demand for simple and secure connections between remote devices is also growing. In general, pairing is the establishment of an authentication key for agreement to secure communications between two devices over a wireless channel. In this paper, we propose a novel, secure, simple Bluetooth Low Energy pairing technology using physical vibration. We describe contact communications using physical vibration and two additional optimizations (8b/10b encoding and single error correction) to improve robustness while maintaining the data transmission rate. The data rate of vibration communication is enhanced by more than 40% with the optimizations. We also present a prototype implementation of the proposed Bluetooth pairing, which employs a mobile phone and a vibration sensor using a piezo-resistive strain gauge. Finally, we discuss the security and usability of our proposed Bluetooth pairing technique for electronic devices, compared with previous methods.