MS Researchers Develop Acoustic Data Transfer System For Phones 180
angry tapir writes "Smartphones that support NFC have been making their way onto the market, but many handsets still don't support the wireless technology. As an alternative, Microsoft researchers have prototyped a system that instead uses a phone's microphone and speaker to transmit and receive data. The P2P data transfer system uses a novel technique of 'self-jamming' to stop nefarious third parties from monitoring transfers, and the researchers believe it's more secure than standard NFC communications. No word on whether it sounds like the squeal of a 56k modem."
Ah, the circle of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Security issue may be flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
First this is a wonderful idea so I don't want to put it down as a useful contribution to the low bandwidth limited distance problem for comunications. Where the authors seem to go south here is the huge time they devote in the article to touting that NFC has no physical security and their system does via "jamSecure". Unless I'm missing something there's no reason, other than changing the standard, that radio based NFC could not also implement JamSecure and even do it better. The idea of JamSecure is that both ends of the communitcation channel transmit at the same time, anyone listening in hears the sum. If one of the emitters is sending simply random noise then the sum is randomized. Yet because the receiver knows what they are emitting they can subtract it out. Don't see why NFC cant do that. Also I don't see why having two (or more) microphones in different locations on an eaves dropper doesn't ruin the addition the encryption is relying on. At least with NFC you can have the transmitters be spatially diverse too, with sound that's harder.
But for very close by communications using existing tech, why not use the screen and the camera? Each phone looks at the others screen and reads it. bandwith becomes the screen refreshrate time the number of resolvable pixels. Presumably at a meter or so that should be close to or better than sound in band width.
why??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't all these devices have bluetooth transceivers already?
Re: Return of the acoustic modem (Score:2, Insightful)
It is entirely unfit that any discussion of drum-memory machines should take place these days without someone mentioning the Story of Mel. It seems this honor has fallen to me, so enjoy! [pbm.com]