The candidate key protocol for generating secret shared keys from similar sensor data streams

Secure communication over wireless channels necessitates authentication of communication partners to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. For spontaneous interaction between independent, mobile devices, no a priori information is available for authentication purposes. However, traditional approaches based on manual password input or verification of key fingerprints do not scale to tens to hundreds of interactions a day, as envisioned by future ubiquitous computing environments. One possibility to solve this problem is authentication based on similar sensor data: when two (or multiple) devices are in the same situation, and thus experience the same sensor readings, this constitutes shared, (weakly) secret information. This paper introduces the Candidate Key Protocol (CKP) to interactively generate secret shared keys from similar sensor data streams. It is suitable for two-party and multi-party authentication, and supports opportunistic authentication.