Secret from Muscle
Lin Yang, Wei Wang, Qian Zhang · 2016
Forming secure pairing between wearable devices has become an important problem in many scenarios, such as mobile payments and private data transmission. This paper presents EMG-KEY, a system that can securely pair wearable devices by leveraging the electrical activity caused by human muscle contraction, that is, Electromyogram (EMG), to generate a secret key. Such a key can then be used by devices to authenticate each other's physical proximity and communicate confidentially. Extensive evaluation on 10 volunteers under different scenarios demonstrates that our system can achieve a competitive bit generation rate of 5.51 bit/s while maintaining a matching probability of 88.84%. Also, the evaluation results with the presence of adversaries demonstrate our system is secure to strong attackers who can eavesdrop on proximate wireless communication, capture and imitate legitimate pairing process with the help of camera.