SocialHBC: Social Networking and Secure Authentication using Interference-Robust Human Body Communication

📝 Abstract

With the advent of cheap computing through five decades of continued miniaturization following Moores Law, wearable devices are becoming increasingly popular. These wearable devices are typically interconnected using wireless body area network (WBAN). Human body communication (HBC) provides an alternate energy-efficient communication technique between on-body wearable devices by using the human body as a conducting medium. This allows order of magnitude lower communication power, compared to WBAN, due to lower loss and broadband signaling. Moreover, HBC is significantly more secure than WBAN, as the information is contained within the human body and cannot be snooped on unless the person is physically touched. In this paper, we highlight applications of HBC as (1) Social Networking (e.g. LinkedIn/Facebook friend request sent during Handshaking in a meeting/party), (2) Secure Authentication using human-human or human-machine dynamic HBC and (3) ultra-low power, secure BAN using intra-human HBC. One of the biggest technical bottlenecks of HBC has been the interference (e.g. FM) picked up by the human body acting like an antenna. In this work, for the first time, we introduce an integrating dual data rate (DDR) receiver technique, that allows notch filtering (>20 dB) of the interference for interference-robust HBC.

💡 Analysis

With the advent of cheap computing through five decades of continued miniaturization following Moores Law, wearable devices are becoming increasingly popular. These wearable devices are typically interconnected using wireless body area network (WBAN). Human body communication (HBC) provides an alternate energy-efficient communication technique between on-body wearable devices by using the human body as a conducting medium. This allows order of magnitude lower communication power, compared to WBAN, due to lower loss and broadband signaling. Moreover, HBC is significantly more secure than WBAN, as the information is contained within the human body and cannot be snooped on unless the person is physically touched. In this paper, we highlight applications of HBC as (1) Social Networking (e.g. LinkedIn/Facebook friend request sent during Handshaking in a meeting/party), (2) Secure Authentication using human-human or human-machine dynamic HBC and (3) ultra-low power, secure BAN using intra-human HBC. One of the biggest technical bottlenecks of HBC has been the interference (e.g. FM) picked up by the human body acting like an antenna. In this work, for the first time, we introduce an integrating dual data rate (DDR) receiver technique, that allows notch filtering (>20 dB) of the interference for interference-robust HBC.

📄 Content

SocialHBC: Social Networking and Secure Authentication using Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Shreyas Sen School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Purdue University shreyas@purdue.edu

ABSTRACT With the advent of cheap computing through five decades of , wearable devices are becoming increasingly popular. These wearable devices are typically interconnected using wireless body area network (WBAN). Human body communication (HBC) provides an alternate energy-efficient communication technique between on- body wearable devices by using the human body as a conducting medium. This allows order of magnitude lower communication power, compared to WBAN, due to lower loss and broadband signaling. Moreover, HBC is significantly more secure than WBAN, as the information is contained within the human body and cannot be snooped on unless the person is physically touched. In this paper, we highlight applications of HBC as (1) Social Networking (e.g. LinkedIn/Facebook friend request sent during Handshaking in a meeting/party), (2) Secure Authentication using human-human or human-machine dynamic HBC and (3) ultra-low power, secure BAN using intra-human HBC. One of the biggest technical bottlenecks of HBC has been the interference (e.g. FM) picked up by the human body acting like an antenna. In this work, for the first time, we introduce an integrating dual data rate (DDR) receiver technique, that allows notch filtering (>20 dB) of the interference for interference-robust HBC.
CCS Concepts Hardware Communication hardware, interfaces and storage Security and privacy Human and societal aspects of security and privacy Human-centered computing

Human computer interaction (HCI).
Keywords Human Body Communication (HBC), Social Networking, Body Coupled Communication (BCC), Secure Authentication, Ultra- Low Power (ULP), Interference tolerance, Resettable Integrator, Adaptive Notch Filter, Integrating DDR Receiver

1. INTRODUCTION The continuous reduction of size of unit computing [1], has propelled the growth of wearable sensors and computing devices (e.g. Fitness trackers, Smart watches). This increasing growth of the wearable market is expected to grow to 600 million by 2020 [2]. Soon, Human Body will become a platform for interconnected wearable smart devices, which will aid and improve human quality of life. This calls for efficient ways to connect these wearable devices on the human body. Moreover, since each individual will (Human Intranet), they can now transmit this information to other humans or machines (Human Internet) at their will or use this information for secure authentication. Such on-body wearable devices are typically interconnected using WBAN. Human Body Communication (HBC) has recently emerged as a strong contender for this human body network, as it provides ultra-low power (ULP) and increased security, compared to WBAN. ULP is achieved as human body is used as a conducting medium, which exhibits significantly lower loss than radio frequency propagation through air. HBC is more secure as the information is contained within the human body and cannot be snooped on unless the person is physically touched, unlike WBAN, where the wireless signals can be easily snooped on by an attacker. HBC was first introduced in the pioneering work [3] from MIT. The authors proposed capacitive near-field coupling and human body coupled conduction. reference (return path). This work provided a simplified electrical model of the HBC network, which treated the human body as a single node i.e. a perfect conductor. Since then, other methods of HBC, such as Galvanic coupling [4] has been explored. This requires direct skin contact and hence is less widely used compared to the capacitive coupled HBC. The authors in [5] used capacitive coupled HBC, along with an electro-optic sensor to increase sensitivity. In [6], authors from Philips Research provides a detailed overview of the progress of HBC up to 2008. Significant progress [7] has been made on modeling the HBC channel, such that it matches the measured characteristics over a wide frequencies and distances.
   The human body acts as an antenna [8] at the FM frequency band. This has been the biggest bottleneck in high-speed ULP HBC implementation. Signaling techniques that allow to circumvent the interference, such as adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) [9] and fixed narrowband signaling [10] have been proposed. However, till date there has been no way to suppress the interference other than avoiding it using adaptive/fixed narrowband signaling, which leads to energy-inefficient implementation and needs bulky filters. In this work, we propose an adaptive broadband NRZ signaling scheme, which suppresses the undesired interference by using resettable integration with dual data rate (DDR) NRZ receiver. The theory supporting this technique is developed along with result

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