S2M: A Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprints-Based Wireless Device Authentication Protocol

TLDR

Device authentication is a critical challenge for IoT, and acoustic fingerprinting that exploits hardware variations offers a promising solution. This paper proposes the lightweight S2M protocol that uses the frequency response of a speaker and microphone as an acoustic hardware fingerprint. S2M authenticates users by matching fingerprints extracted during a learning phase with those obtained during verification. Experiments on mobile phones and PCs demonstrate that S2M achieves low false‑negative and false‑positive rates across diverse scenarios and attacks.

Abstract

Device authentication is a critical and challenging issue for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). One promising solution to authenticate IoT devices is to extract a fingerprint to perform device authentication by exploiting variations in the transmitted signal caused by hardware and manufacturing inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a lightweight device authentication protocol [named speaker-to-microphone (S2M)] by leveraging the frequency response of a speaker and a microphone from two wireless IoT devices as the acoustic hardware fingerprint. S2M authenticates the legitimate user by matching the fingerprint extracted in the learning process and the verification process, respectively. To validate and evaluate the performance of S2M, we design and implement it in both mobile phones and PCs and the extensive experimental results show that S2M achieves both low false negative rate and low false positive rate in various scenarios under different attacks.