A Survey of Wearable Devices Pairing Based on Biometric Signals

With the rapid growth of wearable devices, more applications require direct communication between wearable devices. To secure the communication between wearable devices, various pairing protocols have been proposed to generate common keys for encrypting the communication. Since the wearable devices are attached to the same body, the devices can generate common keys based on the same context by utilizing onboard sensors to capture a common biometric signal such as body motion, gait, heartbeat, respiration, and EMG signals. The context-based pairing does not need prior information to generate common keys. As context-based pairing does not need any human involvement in the pairing process, the pairing also increase the usability of wearable devices. A wide range of context-based pairing approaches has been proposed with different sensors and different biometric signals. Given the increasing popularity of wearable devices and applications of wearable devices, we believe that it is necessary to have a comprehensive review and comparison on the context-based pairing approaches for future research on the pairing. In this paper, we compare context-based pairing approaches and review common techniques used in pairing based on various biometric signals.