Wearable-User Authentication via Cross-Technology Interference in Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

The increasing deployment of wireless sensors enables a broad spectrum of health-related wearable applications. Due to the sensitivity of collected personal health information, these wearables should be authenticated together with their users as “wearable-user pairs” to ensure that they are attached to legitimate users. However, various devices are equipped with dedicated sensing abilities and wireless protocols corresponding to data characteristics in practice. Traditional authentication methodologies may not work in this heterogeneous environment because of protocol incompatibility. For example, how to verify a new ZigBee-enabled monitor when the existing trusted device is Wi-Fi-enabled? Therefore, to achieve authentication across protocols, in this article, we leverage the unique cross-technology interference (CTI), triggered by heterogeneous wireless transmissions, along with human physiological activity measurements (e.g., respiration patterns) to design an authentication scheme between wearables and users. Specifically, the authentication from an unknown ZigBee wearable to a trusted Wi-Fi device is achieved by monitoring the channel state information (CSI) changes according to human respiration. Our approach not only successfully recognizes a legitimate wearable-user pair but also blocks illegal access from adversaries. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate both the security and feasibility of the proposed scheme. The designed mechanism can achieve over 92% authentication accuracy with human subjects.