Providing secure mobile device pairing based on visual confirmation

Abstract

With the increase of personal mobile devices, wireless short-range communications occur frequently and security risks thereon increase since wireless communication channels are inherently easy to eavesdrop on and be under control. In this paper, we investigate a key establishment protocol focusing two properties of wireless mobile communications: 1) a short-range communication without prior trust relationship and 2) a human user who is able to verify both a sender and a receiver devices at the same time. We then propose a simple device pairing method to verify that the shared (temporal) public keys, which are later used to generate a session key, are identical by presenting short text messages on secure side channel (e.g., visual and audio channel). It is easily and intuitively recognized by a human user. ©2009 IEEE.