WaveKey: Secure Mobile Ad Hoc Access to RFID-Protected Systems

This paper presents the design and evaluation of WaveKey, a cross-modal deep learning-based method to enable mobile ad hoc in-situ access to RFID- protected cyber systems. Built upon the ever-growing popularity of user-carried mobile devices and RFID technologies, WaveKey is motivated by the need for secure and user-friendly data access in various application contexts. WaveKey explores a random gesture performed by the mobile user to induce correlated IMU data and RFID signals at the involved mobile device and RFID server, adopts deep learning techniques to extract the complex cross-modal correlation, and devises an Oblivious Transfer-based key-agreement protocol to-ward secure and efficient key establishment. Theoretical analysis and experimental human-based evaluation confirmed the high security and efficiency of WaveKey. In particular, WaveKey shows very high key-establishment success rates consistently exceeding 98 % across all evaluated settings and renders extremely low success rates below 0.5 % for all evaluated common attacks.