Dr Vinod Sarjerao Khandkar

We proposed a novel method to generate a secret between two people using a smartphone gyroscope assisted by the Fast Fourier Transform~(FFT) without communicating between two smartphones for a secret agreement. The secret generation process requires natural smartphone movements while performing day-to-day activities. Our evaluation by implementing it on Android smartphones shows a success rate above 90% with entropy above 6/8 bits. The code implements the secret generation method and its evaluation in Python.

The code implements the Android App to generate a secret using smartphone gyroscope data. It uses the publically available FFT library and is written in Android Java.

Technology-facilitated Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is especially pernicious because it is common for one person (assumed to be an abusive partner) to be responsible for setting up the household's technical infrastructure, which can be used to snoop over the victim. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to generate a secret between the victim and an external supportive agent using a smartphone gyroscope assisted by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) without any communication between two smartphones for secret agreement. The secret generation process requires natural smart-phone movements while performing day-today activities. Our evaluation by implementing it on Android smartphones shows a success rate between 90 − −99%. We proved the resilience of the generated secret under spoofing and brute-force attacks. Thus, the method allows IPV victims to generate a secret to encrypt their communication with an external supporting agent over conventional communication services in the presence of a powerful IPV adversary.