Wearable electronic devices, such as earphones and smartwatches, are currently paired to smartphones and similar tech through a secure Bluetooth or near-field communication (NFC) link – but they could also soon be paired securely by the way you breathe.
at Cleveland State University and his colleagues have developed a protocol that can create a 256-bit encryption key every few seconds – around one human breathing cycle – based on the way a user breathes. This can then be transmitted to wearable devices to keep the two synchronised.
Such synchronisation is important, says Pourbemany, because of the level of personal health data many wearable devices now gather – and the risk of that data being swiped by hackers pairing unapproved devices with them.
Advertisement
“Communication between wearable devices should be protected by encryption,” he says. “And devices need to have a shared secure key for encryption to ensure that an attacker cannot compromise the process.”
A user’s breathing is measured by a respiratory inductance plethysmography sensor, which wraps bands around the chest and abdomen and tracks the movement of the rib cage in and out. An accelerometer attached to the chest provides additional information about the way it moves during each breath. The wearer’s unique breathing pattern is converted to an encrypted key that can be used to confirm that a device is pairing correctly with its wearable counterpart. That key is dynamically generated every 2.85 seconds, meaning the likelihood of a hacker being able to intercept it is reduced.
Errors are inevitable when converting the breathing signal into digital code, so Pourbemany and his colleagues integrated an error-correction technique to reduce the likelihood of paired devices dropping connections.
“The step change here is device synchronisation and error correction of the respiration signal to provide reliable data,” says at Durham University, UK. However, Hardey thinks some tweaks may be necessary for wider adoption, particularly given that the prototype requires the user to wrap bands of material around their chest to hold the sensors in place. “User comfort and trust in the data are obvious obstacles for such applications to overcome.”
Reference:
