UniverSense: IoT Device Pairing through Heterogeneous Sensing Signals

Easily establishing pairing between Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is important for fast deployment in many smart home scenarios. Traditional pairing methods, including passkey, QR code, and RFID, often require specific user interfaces, surface's shape/material, or additional tags/readers. The growing number of low-resource IoT devices without an interface may not meet these requirements, which makes their pairing a challenge. On the other hand, these devices often already have sensors embedded for sensing tasks, such as inertial sensors. These sensors can be used for limited user interaction with the devices, but are not suitable for pairing on their own. In this paper, we present UniverSense, an alternative pairing method between low-resource IoT devices with an inertial sensor and a more powerful networked device equipped with a camera. To establish pairing between them, the user moves the low-resource IoT device in front of the camera. Both the camera and the on-device sensors capture the physical motion of the low-resource device. UniverSense converts these signals into a common state-space to generate fingerprints for pairing. We conduct real-world experiments to evaluate UniverSense and it achieves an F1 score of 99.9% in experiments carried out by five participants.