FREE: A Fast and Robust Key Extraction Mechanism via Inaudible Acoustic Signal

Abstract

To build a secure wireless networking system, it is essential that the cryptographic key is known only to the two (or more) communicating parties. Existing key extraction schemes put the devices into the physical proximity, and utilize the common inherent randomness between the devices to agree on a secret key, but they often rely on custom devices and have low bit rate. In this paper, we seek a key extraction approach that only leverages off-the-shelf mobile devices, while achieving significantly higher key generation efficiency. The core idea of our approach is to exploit fast varying inaudible acoustic channel for generating enough randomness and wireless parallel communication for exchanging reconciliation information to improve the key generation rate. We have carefully studied and validated the feasibility of our approach through both theoretical analysis and a variety of measurements. We implement our approach on different mobile devices and conduct extensive experiments in different real scenarios. The experiment results show that our approach achieves high efficiency and satisfactory robustness. Compared with the state of art methods, our approach improves the key generation rate by 38.46% and reduces the bit mismatch ratio by 42.34%.