Authenticating On-Body Backscatter by Exploiting Propagation Signatures

Abstract: The vision of battery-free communication has made backscatter a compelling technology for on-body wearable and implantable devices. Recent advances have facilitated the communication between backscatter tags and on-body smart devices. These studies have focused on the communication dimension, while the security dimension remains vulnerable. It has been demonstrated that wireless connectivity can be exploited to send unauthorized commands or fake messages that result in device malfunctioning. The key challenge in defending these attacks stems from the minimalist design in backscatter. Thus, in this paper, we explore the feasibility of authenticating an on-body backscatter tag without modifying its signal or protocol. We present SecureScatter, a physical-layer solution that delegates the security of backscatter to an on-body smart device. To this end, we profile the on-body propagation paths of backscatter links, and construct highly sensitive propagation signatures to identify on-body backscatter links. We implement our design in a software radio and evaluate it with different backscatter tags that work at 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz. Results show that our system can identify on-body devices at 93.23% average true positive rate and 3.18% average false positive rate.