Attacks on Acceleration-Based Secure Device Pairing With Automatic Visual Tracking

Hongshuang Hu, Yongdong Wu, Jian Weng, Kaimin Wei, Zhiquan Liu, Feiran Huang, Yinyan Zhang

Abstract: In an acceleration-based Secure Device Pairing (SDP) scheme, two unauthenticated devices continuously measure their own acceleration. If the similarity of their measurements are sufficiently high, the devices will build a secure communication channel assume that it is hard for any attacker to estimate their measurements in real-time. This paper demonstrates that the assumption does not hold and further proposes an effective Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack on acceleration-based SDP schemes. That is to say, an MitM adversary is able to quickly estimate the acceleration measurements of the target devices with automatic visual tracking technologies, and then compromise the device’s communication channel by impersonating the target devices with the estimated measurements. The present attack is extensively evaluated on acceleration-based SDP schemes in indoor and outdoor environments. The evaluation results show that the device’s acceleration can be estimated with high accuracy in real time. Thus, the present MitM attack is practical to defeat the acceleration-based SDP schemes.