iShake: Imitation-Resistant Secure Pairing of Smart Devices via Shaking

In conventional device-to-device (D2D) communication through wireless channels, it is an essential demand to authenticate with each other and establish spontaneous secure connections among the smart devices. In this paper, we propose an imitation-resistant mutual authentication and key generation framework for smart devices, by shaking these devices together. According to the multi-sensor data collected from smart devices, these devices are able to authenticate each other and generate a unique and consistent symmetric key if and only if they are shaken together. We have conducted comprehensive experimental study on shaking various devices, illustrated several novel observations and extracted some important clues for efficient key generation. We propose a series of novel techniques to make the key generation robust to noise and privacy-preserving, and generate highly distinctive and fully randomized symmetric keys among these devices. Realistic experiment results indicate that our solution is able to authenticate with each other and generate the symmetric keys with high accuracy and time-efficiency.