Gesture Input as an Out-of-band Channel

In recent years, there has been growing interest in secure pairing, which refers to the establishment of a secure communication channel between two mobile devices. There are a number of descriptions of the various types of out-of-band (OOB) channels, through which authentication data can be transferred under a user’s control and involvement. However, none have become widely used due to their lack of adaptability to the variety of mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce a new OOB channel, which uses accelerometer-based gesture input. The gesture-based OOB channel is suitable for all kinds of mobile devices, including input/output constraint devices, as the accelerometer is small and incurs only a small computational overhead. We implemented and evaluated the channel using an Apple iPhone handset. The results demonstrate that the channel is viable with completion times and error rates that are comparable with other OOB channels. Keywords—Secure Device Pairing, Out-of-band Channel, Authentication, Gesture Input, Accelerometer