Usable Bootstrapping of Secure Ad Hoc Communication

Short-range wireless communication (based on technologies such as Bluetooth, WiFi and WUSB) has become very common in personal gadgets. Thus, there are many use cases where two or more devices need to securely communicate over these channels. In the absence of prior security context or a trusted third party, setting up security associations between wireless devices is a challenging task, often requiring an additional out-of-band communication channel and direct user involvement in the process. Usable bootstrapping of secure ad hoc Communication has been an active research topic for the last decade but the widely deployed solutions still suffer from security and usability problems.