Toward self-authenticable wearable devices

Abstract

Wearable devices communicate among themselves, but they also need to communicate with remote entities through the Internet in order to share information. Given the sensitivity of the information handled, authentication is needed to allow data access only to authorized parties. However, the existing authentication solutions for wearable devices are limited to scenarios where direct communication between the authenticating parties is possible. With this in mind, we propose an authentication protocol that enables secure mutual end-to-end authentication between a wearable device and any other entity such as another wearable device, a personal device (mobile phone), a remote server, or a user’s application. Our design uses a point-topoint authentication protocol (end-to-end authentication) regardless of whether other intermediate devices are trusted or not. Finally, we present a security evaluation of the proposed authentication protocol.