SkinSense: Efficient vibration-based communications over human body using motion sensors

Abstract

Recent growth in popularity of mobile and wearable devices has re-ignited the need for reliable and stealthy communication side-channels to enable applications such as secret/PIN sharing, co-location proofs and user authentication. Existing short-range wireless radio technology such as Bluetooth/BLE and NFC, although mature and robust, is prone to eavesdropping, jamming and/or interference, and is not very useful as a covert communication side-channel. This paper designs and implements SkinSense, a vibration-based communication protocol which uses human body/skin as a communication medium to create a low-bandwidth and covert communication channel between user-held mobile and wearable devices. SkinSense employs a novel frequency modulation technique for encoding bits as vibration pulses and a spectrogram-based approach to decode the sensed motion data (corresponding to the encoded vibration pulses) to reconstruct the transmitted bits. SkinSense is comprehensively evaluated for a variety of operational parameters, hardware setups and communication settings by means of data collected from human subject participants. Results from these empirical evaluations demonstrate that SkinSense is able to achieve a stable bandwidth of up to 6.6 bps, with bit error rates below 0.1 in our custom hardware setup, and can be employed as a practical communication side-channel.