Deaf-aid: mobile IoT communication exploiting stealthy speaker-to-gyroscope channel

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are hindered from communicating with their neighbors by incompatible protocols or electromagnetic interference. Existing solutions adopting physical covert channels have limitations in receiver distinction, additional hardware, conditional placement, or physical contact. Our system, Deaf-Aid, utilizes the stealthy speaker-to-gyroscope channel to build robust protocolindependent communication with automatic receiver identification. Deaf-Aid exploits ultrasonic signals at a frequency corresponding to the target receiver, forcing the gyroscope inside to resonate, so as to convey information. We probe the relationship among axes in a gyroscope to surmount frequency offset ingeniously and support multi-channel communication. Meanwhile, Deaf-Aid identifies the receivers automatically via device fingerprints constituted by the diversity of resonant frequency ranges. Furthermore, we entitle Deaf-Aid the capability of mobile communication which is an essential demand for IoT devices. We address the challenge of accurate signals recovery from motion interference. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Deaf-Aid yields 47bps with BER lower than 1% under motion interference. To our best knowledge, Deaf-Aid is the first work to enable stealthy mobile IoT communication on the basis of inertial motion sensors.

• Hardware → Sensor applications and deployments.