VariSecure: Facial Appearance Variance based Secure Device Pairing

Ad hoc connection/pairing among IoT devices will be pervasive in the Next Generation Networking (NGN). However, due to its de-centralized nature, it faces more security challenges. In this paper, we propose a secure key pairing protocol for NGN, VariSecure, to enable confidential communication for smartphones. The idea is to leverage a natural human interaction mode: face-to-face interaction. Two users raise up their smartphones to establish a secure channel based on their similar observations from the view of the smartphones’ cameras. One user acts as the initiator and uses the front-facing camera to snap his/her face. The other user captures the initiator’s face using his/her rear camera. Utilizing the facial appearance as a secret substitution, the initiator delivers a randomly generated key to the other user, thus establishing a confidential communication channel between their devices. VariSecure achieves secure device pairing without the complex operations needed in prior works. We implemented VariSecure on the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) smart devices. The experimental results show that VariSecure can establish a face-to-face secure pairing in less than 3 seconds.