A Nonlinearity-Based Secure Face-to-Face Device Authentication for Mobile Devices

Xiaoyu Ji, Xinyan Zhou, Chen Yan, Jiangyi Deng, Wenyuan Xu

Abstract: With the proliferation of mobile devices, face-to-face device-to-device (D2D) communication has been applied to a variety of daily scenarios such as mobile payment and short distance file transfer. In D2D communications, a critical security problem is to verify the device legitimacy when they share no secrets in advance. Previous research proposed device authentication schemes based on pre-built database or exploiting physical properties. However, a remaining challenge is to secure face-to-face D2D communication even in the middle of a crowd, within which an attacker may hide. In this paper, we present <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NAuth</monospace> , a nonlinearity-enhanced, location-sensitive authentication mechanism. Especially, we target at the secure authentication within a limited range such as 20 cm, which is typical for face-to-face scenarios. <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NAuth</monospace> designs a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">verification scheme</i> based on the nonlinear distortion of speaker-microphone systems and a location-based <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">validation model</i> . The verification scheme guarantees device authentication consistency by extracting acoustic nonlinearity patterns (ANP) while the validation model ensures device legitimacy by measuring the time difference of arrival (TDOA) at two microphones. We analyze the feasibility and security of <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NAuth</monospace> theoretically and evaluate its performance experimentally. Results demonstrate that <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NAuth</monospace> can verify the device legitimacy in the presence of nearby attackers.