Coresident evil
S Abhishek Anand, Nitesh Saxena · 2017
An interesting approach to pairing devices involves the use of a vibrational channel, over which the keying material (e.g., a short PIN) is sent. This approach is efficient (only a unidirectional transfer of PIN is needed) and simple (the sending device requires a vibration motor and receiving device requires an accelerometer). However, it has been shown to be susceptible to acoustic emanations usually produced by the vibration motor. Recent research introduced a mechanism to defeat these attacks by attempting to mask the acoustic leakage with deliberate acoustic noises. In this paper, we pursue a systematic investigation of the security of such a "noisy vibrational pairing" mechanism in a strong yet realistic adversarial model where the eavesdropper is co-located with the victim device(s).