Performance and Usability Analysis of Proof-of-proximity (PoP) Framework

Abstract

Security and privacy remain to be a major concern for the computing world – from traditional wired networks to modern mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and ubiquitous/pervasive computing systems. Ubiquitous computing systems vary from conventional computing systems due to several reasons, such as ubiquitous computing systems are by nature ad hoc, more dynamic and there is spontaneous interaction among the devices. Most of the time, these systems are composed of modern small, handheld or embedded devices. These modern devices have support for some kind of wireless channel (i.e. WiFi, Infrared, Bluetooth, Laser etc) for communication purposes. As the wireless channels are inherently prone to security risks, the communication among the devices in these systems is not secure and these are susceptible to various attacks, such as MiTM attack. Consequently, in order to secure these systems, we need different tools and techniques than conventional security mechanisms. One of the recently addressed issues in ad-hoc and ubiquitous computing systems is the establishment of a secure channel between two devices. In literature, it is called secure device pairing. This issue is addressed by many researchers and several solutions have been proposed. We also realized the importance of this issue and proposed a framework based approach to secure device pairing. The focus of this paper is the performance evaluation and extended usability analysis of the proposed Proof-of-Proximity (PoP) framework.