Pairing Devices with Good Quality Output Interfaces

“Pairing ” is referred to as the operation of achieving au-thenticated key agreement between two human-operated devices over a short-range wireless communication channel (such as Bluetooth or WiFi). The devices are ad hoc in nature, i.e., they can neither be assumed to have a prior context (such as pre-shared secrets) with each other nor do they share a common trusted on- or off-line authority. However, the devices can gen-erally be connected using auxiliary physical channel(s) (such as audio, visual, etc.) that can be authenticated by the device user(s), and thus form the basis for pairing. In this paper, we present the results of a user study of a technique to pair two devices (such as two cell phones) which have good quality output interfaces (in the form of dis-play/speaker/vibration)