SkinSense: Efficient Vibration-based Communications Over Human Body Using Motion Sensors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wijewickrama, Raveen, Dohadwalla, Sameer Anis, Maiti, Anindya, Jadliwala, Murtuza, Narain, Sashank
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Wijewickrama, Raveen
Dohadwalla, Sameer Anis
Maiti, Anindya
Jadliwala, Murtuza
Narain, Sashank
author_facet Wijewickrama, Raveen
Dohadwalla, Sameer Anis
Maiti, Anindya
Jadliwala, Murtuza
Narain, Sashank
contents Recent growth in popularity of mobile and wearable devices has re-ignited the need for reliable and stealthy communication side-channels to enable applications such as secret/PIN sharing, co-location proofs and user authentication. Existing short-range wireless radio technology such as Bluetooth/BLE and NFC, although mature and robust, is prone to eavesdropping, jamming and/or interference, and is not very useful as a covert communication side-channel. This paper designs and implements SkinSense, a vibration-based communication protocol which uses human body/skin as a communication medium to create a low-bandwidth and covert communication channel between user-held mobile and wearable devices. SkinSense employs a novel frequency modulation technique for encoding bits as vibration pulses and a spectrogram-based approach to decode the sensed motion data (corresponding to the encoded vibration pulses) to reconstruct the transmitted bits. SkinSense is comprehensively evaluated for a variety of operational parameters, hardware setups and communication settings by means of data collected from human subject participants. Results from these empirical evaluations demonstrate that SkinSense is able to achieve a stable bandwidth of upto 6.6 bps, with bit error rates below 0.1 in our custom hardware setup, and can be employed as a practical communication side-channel.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_06037
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SkinSense: Efficient Vibration-based Communications Over Human Body Using Motion Sensors
Wijewickrama, Raveen
Dohadwalla, Sameer Anis
Maiti, Anindya
Jadliwala, Murtuza
Narain, Sashank
Signal Processing
Human-Computer Interaction
Recent growth in popularity of mobile and wearable devices has re-ignited the need for reliable and stealthy communication side-channels to enable applications such as secret/PIN sharing, co-location proofs and user authentication. Existing short-range wireless radio technology such as Bluetooth/BLE and NFC, although mature and robust, is prone to eavesdropping, jamming and/or interference, and is not very useful as a covert communication side-channel. This paper designs and implements SkinSense, a vibration-based communication protocol which uses human body/skin as a communication medium to create a low-bandwidth and covert communication channel between user-held mobile and wearable devices. SkinSense employs a novel frequency modulation technique for encoding bits as vibration pulses and a spectrogram-based approach to decode the sensed motion data (corresponding to the encoded vibration pulses) to reconstruct the transmitted bits. SkinSense is comprehensively evaluated for a variety of operational parameters, hardware setups and communication settings by means of data collected from human subject participants. Results from these empirical evaluations demonstrate that SkinSense is able to achieve a stable bandwidth of upto 6.6 bps, with bit error rates below 0.1 in our custom hardware setup, and can be employed as a practical communication side-channel.
title SkinSense: Efficient Vibration-based Communications Over Human Body Using Motion Sensors
topic Signal Processing
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06037