Pairing devices for social interactions

Ersin Uzun, Nitesh Saxena, Arun Kumar
2011 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '11  
When users wish to establish wireless radio communication between/among their devices, the channel has to be bootstrapped first. The process of setting up a secure communication channel between two previously unassociated devices is referred to as "Secure Device Pairing". The focus of prior research on this topic has mostly been limited to "personal pairing" scenarios, whereby a single user controls both the devices. In this paper, we instead consider "social pairing" scenarios, whereby two
more » ... erent users establish pairing between their respective devices. We present a comprehensive study to identify methods suitable for social pairing, and comparatively evaluate the usability and security of these methods. Our results identify methods best-suited for users, in terms of efficiency, error-tolerance and of course, usability. Our work provides insights on the applicability and usability of methods for emerging social pairing scenarios, a topic largely ignored so far.
doi:10.1145/1978942.1979282 dblp:conf/chi/UzunSK11 fatcat:ooyls4s3ijf47bfz6rldprb7ey