Innovative Key Generation Approach to Encrypt Wireless Communication in Personal Area Networks

In this paper we present a signal processing methodology for sharing symmetric keys in personal area networks. Symmetric encryption and decryption are commonly used because of limitations in computing power and energy consumption. However, key sharing still imposes challenges regarding usability, computational complexity of algebraic key exchange algorithms, and security. Our approach is that keys are generated locally on devices by shaking them, and that the keys are equal if and only if the devices are shaken together. Based on practical assessments, we show that the key generation algorithm is able to generate keys from acceleration data with an average entropy of 13bit/key in 70% of the cases.