2018 Eleventh International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Network (ICMU)

Software Modem for Secure Near-field

Communication for Smartphones
Using Sound and Vibration
1st Saki Nishihara, 2nd Takuya Aoki
Graduate School of Sys. and Inform. Eng.
University of Tsukuba
Tsukuba, Japan
3rd Tadashi Ebihara, 4th Koichi Mizutani, 5th Naoto Wakatsuki
Faculty of Eng., Inform. and Sys.
University of Tsukuba
Tsukuba, Japan
ebihara@iit.tsukuba.ac.jp

Abstract—Acoustic communication and vibrational communi- Message

cation are notable technologies as means for exchanging data
Transmitter Key
among smartphones in close proximity; they can be easily
Encryption
implemented as software with the use of hardware mounted
on smartphones. We proposed a hybrid (acoustic-vibrational) Acoustic Vibrational
communication system, which enables to exchange data fast communication communication
and securely by transmitting an encrypted message and the
encryption key as sound and vibration, respectively. In this Header Appender Appender Header
paper, we designed a software modem of the hybrid system, and
footer
implemented the modem in smartphones, investigated some
OFDM OOK
parameters of vibrational communication, and evaluated its modulation modulation
security in experiments. The obtained results suggest that the OFDM signal Pulse signal
software modem can realize fast and secure communication by
selecting appropriate parameters for each device. RZ coding
Loudspeaker Vibration
Index Terms—near field communication, acoustic devices, com- motor “0” “1”
munication system security
Receiver
Microphone
I. I NTRODUCTION
Time
BPF
Near-field communication is a useful technology that makes
Acoustic signal Vibrational signal
authentication in real life easier (e.g. payments in shops).
Hence, near-field communication that plays such a role must Synchronization Synchronization
be secure and should have ease of use. Focusing on near-field
Index Index
communication among smartphones, currently, radio waves, OFDM OOK
demodulation demodulation
infrared light, sound, and vibration are commonly used [1]–
[4]. Among them, communication using sound and vibra- Key
Decryption
tion allows us to better utilize the existing infrastructure
(e.g. loudspeaker, vibration, and microphone of smartphone). Message
Moreover, the modems of acoustic communication and vibra-
Fig. 1. Processing flow of the hybrid communication system.
tional communication can be easily implemented as software
[1]–[4]. In addition, acoustic communication and vibrational
communication have complementary characteristics; acoustic
II. D ESIGN OF S OFTWARE M ODEM OF H YBRID
communication is fast and covers wide area, while vibrational
C OMMUNICATION
communication is slow and covers limited area.
To provide fast and secure communication, we proposed Fig. 1 shows an overview of our designed hybrid commu-
a hybrid (acoustic-vibrational) communication system in [5], nication system. The transmitter encrypts a message with an
where an encrypted message is transmitted by sound with encryption key. The encrypted message is modulated with a
sufficient data rate, and an encryption key is transmitted by header into an acoustic signal by using orthogonal frequency
vibration securely. division multiplexing (OFDM) and the signal is emitted from
In this paper, we designed a software modem of the hybrid the loudspeaker. On the other hand, the encryption key is
system, implemented the modem in smartphones, investigated modulated with header and footer patterns into a pulse signal
some parameters of vibrational communication, and evaluated by applying on-off keying (OOK) with return-to-zero (RZ)
its security in experiments. coding and the signal is emitted from the vibration motor.

978-4-907626-34-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IPSJ

 2018 Eleventh International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Network (ICMU)

Smartphone (a) Device #1 (b) Device #2 BER

(Receiver) 100
Smartphone 100 100
(Transmitter) 90 90

(ms)

(ms)
80 80
Smartphone 10-1
70 70

Driving duration

Driving duration
(Interceptor)
60 60
50 50
10-2
40 40
30 30
20 20
Distance between 10-3
40 80 120 160 40 80 120 160
Acoustic absorbing material transmitter and interceptor
Symbol period (ms) Symbol period (ms)
Fig. 2. Schematic view of the experimental system.
Fig. 3. BER of vibrational communication (a) transmitter: device #1, receiver:
device #1; (b) transmitter: device #2, receiver: device #1. The circle marks
TABLE I denote the parameters we selected.
PARAMETERS USED IN EXPERIMENT
Parameters Value (a) Device #1 (b) Device #2
Sampling frequency (kHz) 48

Successful interceptions

Successful interceptions
20 20
Carrier frequency (kHz) 8.15
Signal bandwidth (kHz) 6.3 15 15
Acoustic Number of subcarriers 32
communication Order of frequency diversity 2 10 10
Length of guard interval (ms) 10
Modulation method BPSK 5 5
Length of message (bits) 4800
Vibrational Pass band of BPF (Hz) 100–250 0 0
0 10 20 30 40 50 0 10 20 30 40 50
communication Length of key (bits) 64 Distance (mm) Distance (mm)

Fig. 4. The number of successful interceptions of vibrational communication

The receiver receives both the acoustic signal and the
vibrational signal with the microphone. The acoustic signal is
synchronized and demodulated into an encrypted message. The
vibrational signal is obtained by applying a band-pass filter
(BPF) to the received signal, synchronized, and demodulated
into an encryption key. The receiver decrypts the demodulated
message by using the demodulated key and obtains the original
message.
III. E XPERIMENTS
The designed software modem was implemented in smart-
phones. Since the performance of vibrational communication
depends on the vibration motor and its control, we investigated
two parameters, driving duration α and symbol period w
(Fig. 1), in several models of smartphone. Then, the security
of the communication was evaluated in the distance between
a transmitter and an interceptor.
Fig. 2 shows the experimental system in an anechoic cham-
ber. We prepared two Android smartphone models [device #1
(C1905, SONY) and device #2 (SHV31, SHARP)]. Table I
shows the parameters used in the experiments. The parameters
α and w (α ≤ w) were varied in a range of 20–100 ms and 40–
160 ms, respectively. The hybrid communication was repeated
20 times for each set of parameters.
Fig. 3 shows the bit error rates (BERs) of the vibrational
communication part. To achieve faster transmission and nar-
rower leakage area, shorter symbol period w and shorter
driving duration α are preferable under BER of 0. From the
result, the BER performance varied depending on devices, and
we selected the sets of preferable parameters (w, α) = (80 ms,
(a) transmitter: device #1, interceptor: device #1, w = 80 ms, α = 50 ms; (b)
transmitter: device #2, interceptor: device #1, w = 80 ms, α = 20 ms.
50 ms) for device #1 and (80 ms, 20 ms) for device #2. Fig. 4
shows the result of interception of vibrational communication
using the determined parameters. The data transmitted from
both devices did not leak out over 30 mm.
IV. C ONCLUSION
To provide secure and fast communication among smart-
phones, a software modem of a hybrid (acoustic-vibrational)
communication system was designed. We implemented the
software modem on smartphones and investigated the param-
eters w and α in experiments. The obtained results suggest
that the software modem can realize fast and secure commu-
nication by selecting appropriate parameters for each device.
R EFERENCES
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