Secure Device Pairing: A Usability Study

Ubiquitous computing systems are becoming more common nowadays. Usually, these systems are composed of several modern hand-held devices, which support wireless communication in some form, such as WiFi, IrDA, Bluetooth, etc. Since wireless communication is open to everyone, the issue is how to pair two unassociated devices securely. Consequently, a wide community of industrial as well as academic researchers have proposed more than two dozen schemes and protocols that use various forms of out-ofband channels to pair the two devices securely. The main goal of the research community working on this issue has been to develop and/or propose such pairing systems/schemes, which should be automatic, secure and usable. One such system is proposed by Malkani et. al. [1]. The main goal of this research was to design a generic system that facilitates association of two co-located devices by demonstration of physical proximity in ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, we are presenting the usability study of several pairing schemes and the proposed system, which was carried out to evaluate the overall system.