Dhwani: Secure Peer-to-Peer Acoustic NFC
Near Field Communication (NFC) enables physically proximate devices to communicate over very short ranges in a peer-to-peer manner without incurring complex network configuration overheads. However, adoption of NFC-enabled applications has been stymied by the low levels of penetration of NFC hardware. In this paper, we address the challenge of enabling NFC-like capability on the existing base of mobile phones. To this end, we develop Dhwani, a novel, acoustics-based NFC system that uses the microphone and speakers on mobile phones, thus eliminating the need for any specialized NFC hardware. A key feature of Dhwani is the JamSecure technique, which uses self-jamming coupled with self-interference cancellation at the receiver, to provide an information-theoretically secure communication channel between the devices. Our current implementation of Dhwani achieves data rates of up to 2.4 Kbps, which is sufficient for most existing NFC applications.
security nfc wireless