Practical device association protocols for wireless enabled personal devices

Personal electronic devices, with short-range wireless capability are becoming commonplace. Wireless enabled devices belonging to the same user (domain) need to be associated long-term to each other with as much ease as connections with physical wires. It should be obvious which two devices are being associated. Managing device associations must be simple, intuitive and communication between associated devices secure. This paper describes touch-mediated association protocols (TAP) which enable user-friendly, secure long-term device associations. TAP extends the resurrecting duckling security model. It uses an intuitive UI (the mediator), a physical device which taps devices that need to be associated. TAP does not require any PKI, uses computationally cheap cryptography and is easy to integrate.