NDNViber: Vibration-Assisted Automated Bootstrapping of IoT Devices

The rapid proliferation of sensors and their use in the modern Internet of Things (IoT) environment has led to a highly connected environment. For these inexpensive and connected devices to function efficiently, they need to communicate with each other as per the application they support. Communication with the correct entity and joining the correct network to share information are necessary operations. The action of pairing such devices securely so that they can trust the information exchange between them is termed as onboarding / trust bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is usually a highly cumber-some process, especially in resource-constrained and interface-less devices, which may not be accessible even physically after installation. In this paper, we propose NDNViber which compliments the existing bootstrapping techniques used in NDN based IoT networks. NDNViber provides NDN based networks with a dynamic, usable and secure out-of-band communication scheme using modulated vibrations to bootstrap multiple devices simultaneously and works in devices without any user interfaces. We implement a prototype that involves a commodity smartphone as the controller that can bootstrap many small IoT devices that possess accelerometer sensors. With NDNViber, we also analyze the bootstrapping of IoT devices that are inaccessible due to their physical orientation and deployment locations.