Secure Interactions for Smart Devices

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Secure Interactions for Smart Devices"

by

Mr. Lin YANG


Abstract:

With the ability to interact with user, connect to other peers, and sense 
the environment, smart devices, including mobile devices, wearables, and 
Internet-of-Thing devices, have enabled a plethora of promising 
applications and penetrated into every part of our life. Along with the 
convenience it brought, it also comes an increasing concern on smart 
device's security issues, as the data involved is often extremely valuable 
and highly sensitive. Also, the limited computing resource, growing data 
transmission capability and expanding device-device connectivity have 
aggravated the security threats.

In this thesis, we focus on the security issues in the interactions of 
smart device. Three major types of interactions exist in the ecosystem of 
smart device:

(1)  User-device interaction defines how the user access the device. From 
the perspective of security design, we put our focus on determining what 
information can be accessed by current user. To this end, a fundamental 
problem is to recognizing who is using the smart device, i.e., user 
identification. In this thesis, we leverage the bio-vibrometry to enable a 
novel user identification system, VibID, for smart devices. By examining 
the vibration response patterns of human arm at different frequencies, our 
system can ensure a identification accuracy above 91% in small-scale 
scenarios with 8 users and is robust to various confounding factors.

(2) Device-device connection creates direct communication links among 
smart devices. Fueled by the wide adoption of smart devices, the 
device-device connection is prevalent and forming secure pairing between 
devices lays the foundations of the security protection and data privacy 
preservation. In this thesis, we propose two solutions for this problem. 
Touch-And-Guard (TAG) is a system that uses hand touch as an intuitive 
manner to establish a secure connection between a wristband wearable and 
the touched device. It generates secret bits from hand resonant properties 
and use it to authenticate each other and then communicate confidentially. 
We demonstrate the feasibility of our system using an experimental 
prototype and conduct experiments on 12 users. The results indicate that 
our system can generate secret bits at a rate of 7.84 bit/s, which is 58\% 
faster than conventional text input PIN authentication. Apart from this, 
we further leverage the Electromyogram signal (EMG) caused by human muscle 
contraction to generate a secret key. Extensive evaluation on 10 
volunteers under different scenarios demonstrates that our system, 
EMG-KEY, can achieve a competitive bit generation rate of 5.51 bit/s while 
maintaining a matching probability of 88.84\%. Also, the evaluation 
results with the presence of adversaries demonstrate our system is very 
secure to strong attackers who can eavesdrop on proximate wireless 
communication, capture and imitate legitimate pairing process with the 
help of camera.

(3) In the context of device-environment sensing, we investigate how to 
prevent pirate photo/video taking, which is one of the most disturbing 
issues resulted from the smart device's unrestricted sensing ability. To 
prevent pirate photo/video taking on the physical intelligence properties, 
such as painting, sculpture, we propose a new lighting system, 
Rolling-Light, to pollute the pirate photo/video on mobile camera, but 
retain a good visual quality for human observer. By carefully modulating 
the chromatic change and luminance flicker into the light system, we can 
introduce nonuniform variation into the reflected light energy from 
physical objects, thus maximize the distortion caused by the camera's 
banding effect. Meanwhile, due to the color fusion ability and 
low-band-pass characteristics of human vision, the visual quality for 
human observer is not affected. Our preliminary result indicates 
Rolling-Light can significantly degrade the quality of pirate photo/video 
and can provide a practical anti-piracy solution in many scenarios.


Date:  			Thursday, 23 February 2017

Time:                   3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 4475
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Bo Li (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Kai Chen
 			Dr. Wei Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****