Breathe-to-Pair (B2P)
Jafar Pourbemany, Ye Zhu, Riccardo Bettati · 2022
We propose Breathe-to-Pair (B2P), a protocol for pairing and shared-key generation for wearable devices that leverages the wearer's respiration activity to ensure that the devices are part of the same body-area network. We assume that the devices exploit different types of sensors to extract and process the respiration signal. We illustrate B2P for the case of two devices that use respiratory inductance plethysmography (RIP) and accelerometer sensors, respectively. Allowing for different types of sensors in pairing allows us to include wearable devices that use a variety of different sensors. In practice, this form of sensor variety creates a number of challenges that limit the ability of the shared-key establishment algorithm to generate matching keys. The two main obstacles are the lack of synchronization across the devices and the need for correct noise-induced mismatches between the generated key bit-strings.