You are touching me! A Monitoring Mechanism for Secure Key Generation

Abstract

The complexity of the technology we interact with in our day to day life increases, but the effort we want to spend managing these interactions does not. Secure communication is one of these interactions. This thesis proposes a design of a security protocol that generates symmetric cryptographic keys which can be used as a basis for secure connection between two people. The creation of the keys is based upon the two biometrics, ECG and EEG, and that the two people are physically touching. A proof of concept which depends on the ECG of two people has been implemented. Given the correct EEG hardware, we argue that this proof of concept could easily be extendable to a full system. Through statistical analysis on ECG measurements and experimentation, supporting algorithms have been implemented. The biggest contribution has been the creation of a touch detection algorithm, which can detect the moment when a person is touched, based on their ECG signal.