FS2M: fuzzy smart IoT device pairing protocol via speak to microphone

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a secure and efficient pairing protocol for two devices. Due to the large amount of data involving sensitive information transmitted in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, generating a secure shared key between smart devices for secure data sharing becomes essential. However, existing smart devices pairing schemes require longer pairing time and are difficult to resist attacks caused by context, as the secure channel is established based on restricted entropy from physical context.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a fuzzy smart IoT device pairing protocol via speak to microphone, FS2M. In FS2M, the device pairing is realized from the speaking audio of humans in the environment around the devices, which is easily implemented in the vast majority of Internet products. Specifically, to protect the privacy of secret keys and improve efficiency, this paper presents a single-round pairing protocol by adopting a recently published asymmetric fuzzy encapsulation mechanism (AFEM), which allows devices with similar environmental fingerprints to successfully negotiate the shared key. To instantiate AFEM, this paper presents a construction algorithm, the AFEM-ECC, based on elliptic curve cryptography.

Findings

This paper analyzes the security of the FS2M and its pairing efficiency with extensive experiments. The results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a secure device pairing between two IoT devices with high efficiency.

Originality/value

In FS2M, a novel cryptographic primitive (i.e., AFEM-ECC) are designed for IoT device pairing by using a new context-environment (i.e., human voice) . The experimental results show that FS2M has a good performance in both communication cost (i.e., 130 KB) and running time (i.e., 10 S).

Citation

Jia, H., Chen, D., Xie, Z. and Qin, Z. (2025), "FS2M: fuzzy smart IoT device pairing protocol via speak to microphone", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 21 No. 1, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-06-2024-0169