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)
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I've actually been thinking for a while that this could be really good for challenge / response systems. Hold the phone up to the laptop, let it talk. A reliable character a second is probably less painful than dealing with a human.
Jason.
Return of the acoustic modem (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, return of the acoustic modem. That really is a trip back in time. Was cutting-edge technology, back in the era of blinking-light consoles, when telephones were hardwired into the wall.
Ah, nostalgia for the tech of yore.
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bload "cas:game", r
When loading 32kb of data took several minutes... good old times! :)
[now grandpa, come tell us how it was with the punch cards (but then the only sound involved was that of frustration)]
Re:Return of the acoustic modem (Score:5, Interesting)
Grandpa here.
My recollection is that paper tapes and punchcard readers where a lot faster than cassette tapes for loading in programs. The reason cassettes were nice is that that the cost of the reader hardware was cheap--you probably already had a casstte player. and the results were compact. In my experience the paper tapes were the most durable. the tapes tended to go bad on you or not work between different machines with different settings. If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled. the paper tapes were compact and reliable.
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...If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled.
For me it was when you dropped your punch card deck, it would be scrambled.
Re:Return of the acoustic modem (Score:4, Interesting)
...If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled.
For me it was when you dropped your punch card deck, it would be scrambled.
That's why I always punched sequence numbers in col 73-80. If the deck is dropped, a few minutes in the card sorter and the problem is fixed.
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If you dropped your punch card deck it could get scrambled. the paper tapes were compact and reliable.
Better yet, punched card readers had a habit of crunching up the first card on the deck fairly often.
The first card at the Batch Terminal that I used at the U of M back in the late 70's was the password card. So it was fairly common to be able to dig in the trash can next to the unattended Remote Batch Terminal in the History Building and find someone's mangled password card. Which could then be read/dec
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we had to punch our cards by hand using a unbent paper clip, and send them to the computer centre by mail
(when I was in high school, programming in FORTRAN )
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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]
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Wow, I can now dust off my high-speed acoustic coupler! It would plug into the phone line out on a modem, and give you a decent percentage of the 14.4 Kbaud, say anywhere from 40-80%, depending on the phone, etc. I bought it because it meant that I could do support on Unix systems even if the only net connection I had available was a pay phone!
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Whole new meaning to pay-as-you-go!
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Re:Return of the acoustic modem (Score:4, Informative)
I just found the information on the device I have...it's called the Konexx KOUPLER, and it's pretty snazzy! Their web site claims speeds up to 26.4 Kbps. But I guess that is under ideal conditions...Web site says they still sell it, and it's $150 US.
More information here: http://www.konexx.com/koupler.htm [konexx.com]
p.s. I have no connection with these guys other than the fact I have used their product in the past, and found it to be a wonderful part of a Road Warriors's toolkit!
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Now you just have to find a payphone...
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Hard drive? You're thinking too recently. Either that, or you worked in the glass-house with the raised floors.
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Only if you had some cheap winmodem. Most decent hardware modems were external. I had a Hayes Accura and a USR hardware modem; still do though I no longer use them. I have been hanging on to them because I have been thinking about setting up a FAX server in the house.
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Only if you had some cheap winmodem. Most decent hardware modems were external.
Actiontec made an excellent 56k internal controller-based modem, I think I still have one in the closet somewhere. I used to recommend it as an upgrade for people with Winmodem-related system stability and connection issues.
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I recall my controller-based internal modems had blinkenlights too; two green LEDs for, I believe, transmit and receive. I think it was a US Robotics 56k, but it's been a while so my memory is understandably hazy as to the brand. It might have been an Actiontec.
Of course, since the device was installed internally and the backplate was facing the wall, the LEDs were functionally useless to me.
Nonetheless it was possible to have a decent internal modem that both was no/ a Winmodem /and/ had blinkenlights.
(I a
Re:Return of the acoustic modem (Score:4)
Sit down right here sonney and let me tell you a story :-)
In the days of 300-1200 baud modems, the modem sat on a desk connected to the terminal (usually) by a serial cable. There were indeed blinkinlights on the front. Some terminals had the modem built-in on top, but you still had the blinkenlights. You would pick up the phone, dial it (and it WAS often a rotary phone) and when you heard the squeel, you shoved the handset into the rubber cups on top of the modem and watch the blinkinlights to see if it made a good connection.
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Actually, that WAS a modem, it was just an acoustic modem. It was necessary in the days when phones were typically hard wired into the wall and Bell didn't allow 3rd party hardware to be connected directly.
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I think we could just use Bluetooth to couple the phone with the laptop and send digitized acoustics that way. It seems like Bluetooth is ubiquitous on both phones and laptops. A simple pairing and no additional rubber hardware is needed.
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Clearly you've never tried using Bluetooth to exchange data between an iPhone and an Android phone. Fuck, you can't even do it between two iPhones, or two non-rooted+reflashed Android phones for that matter (at least, not without one or both users having to spend 3-5 minutes downloading and installing a third party app first).
Now I know how civilizations fall... they throw away working infrastructure before there's a good replacement, or have it destroyed by a natural disaster after they've become too poor
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It's amazing what comes back as "new developments"
Yeah, and from Multiple Sclerosis researchers yet.
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That was my first thought as well when I read the headline.
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.
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What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have
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What I find curious about the emphasis on 'physical security'(while the mechanism used is clever) is that it seems to ignore the fact that "How can I safely communicate over an insecure channel?" is a relatively solved problem. Unless this scheme is unbearably slow, you just encrypt what goes over the wire (with the requirement for physical proximity hopefully preventing spoofing by a malicious node, not that NFC does anything different).
isn't the problem here, setting up the communication channel? for slow speed communication, the end goal may be just sending some short message like a credit card number. using something like a public key to exchange keys, might be very cumbersome, since those would grossly exceed the message length itself and thus require a much longer stable communication channel duration. That might not work with low bandwidth systems.
As for screen/camera, I imagine that it's because not all phones have a camera on the same side as the screen. Virtually all phones have both items; but unless their locations differ enough between models and manufacturers that interfacing could get tricky.
Why? how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation.
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"how is that different than microphone placement or NFC antenna orientation."
Microphones and speakers are substantially closer to being omnidirectional than screens and cameras are. Many phones will deliberately cancel some of what they pick up, to get clearer voice input; but if set to speakerphone, your totally-unexceptional mic is impressively sensitive. A camera that isn't pointed right at the target screen, though, isn't going to be able to determine much more than approximate color and brightness.
As f
Another flaw: MIMO (Score:2)
Another flaw is that Jam Secure isn't either in the audio or the hypothesized radio implementation.
A signal being jammed by another of comparable strength and nontrivial spacial separation can be received by TWO or more microphones, or antennas, also with nontrivial separation, and the signals sorted out in postprocessing (at "line speed").
This is how MIMO works: Two (or more) transmitting antennas send different signals, two or more receiving antennas receive sums of them - which differ because each anten
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NFC isn't supposed to have any security, any more than ethernet is. It's a transport protocol, low level. Security is on the layers above, typically at the application level.
The fact that the researchers don't understand this doesn't inspire confidence. The biggest application for NFC is secure payments, and the security isn't in the NFC part.
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Yeah, their "Jamsecure" technology can be defeated by simply using two microphones instead of one, and sampling at double the rate of the signal. After that, just feed the inverse of the first microphone's signal into the second on a delay based on the distance from the seocnd microphone... and then do the same to the reverse. Viola, both signals are reconstructed.
Heterodyning only happens when you have a single receiver. MIMO technology and signal analysis has come a long way since then... you can separate
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Did they seriously just call a modem 'new' technology?
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It's "on a mobile phone". That's "on a computer", "on the internet" and "in the cloud" all rolled into one.
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This just in: microsoft and/or apple patents "acoustical transmission", claims it is entirely different than modems - because it's.....wireless/uses a cellphone!
amazing. /s
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The paper was accepted after peer review at ACM/Sigcomm, presumably the most selective computer networking conference. It would not have been accepted if this was just about reinventing acoustic coupling. The novel part there is the attention to physical security, the fact that the receiver deliberately jams the transmission to make it harder for third parties to eavesdrop. That's actually quite clever.
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The really clever thing is being able to just refuse to use your phone for financial transactions, removing the need for this in the first place.
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A few months back, I actually tried a 300 bps connection to a Diversi-Dial system over VoIP. It worked, for small values of "working." There was a surprising amount of line noise even though the VoIP connection was G.711 (64 kbps mu-law) and sounded crystal-clear for voice purposes.
So they reinvented chirp.io (Score:5, Informative)
So they reinvented chirp.io ?
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Who reinvented the modem...
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The conundrum here is that they have to find a new phrase for the patent application that doesn't involve "on a computer".
And they call it (Score:4, Funny)
"modem"
Re:And they call it (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always found it interesting that "modem" and "modern" are so easy to confuse in most fonts....
Re:And they call it (Score:5, Funny)
It's a keming problem.
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Well, sure, but don't the font developers ever check this stuff out,
by, for example, looking at real words on real displays?
Just imagine how confusing this could be to a copying machine.
That's a wooshing problem.
Re:And they call it (Score:5, Funny)
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If i still had mod points, I'd mod you fumy.
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It's a keming problern.
Fixed that for you.
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Can we shoot the shitty font designers .. please? :-)
Almost as bad as the retards who make ONE and lowercase L look the same, or ZERO and uppercase O.
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"modem"
But without the need for an Acoustic coupler. [wikipedia.org] NFC as an app and the geek cracks wise?
But... (Score:2)
...did they patent it yet?
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...did they patent it yet?
Of course - It's on a cell phone!
Acoustic couplers' nostalgia... (Score:5, Funny)
GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN.
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When I hear acoustic couplers I pound on the wall so they know to keep it down.
Already done (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217790/Sound_based_system_promises_chipless_NFC_now
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I think you mean:
Already done [wikipedia.org]
Already exists (Score:5, Funny)
You can already transfer music between phones like this, but it's quite lossy depending on the quality of your speaker.
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As a kid, I remember setting up my tape recorder at one end of our coffee table hi-fi so I could record Casey Kasem's Top 100 countdown on New Year's Eve. I'd have a couple friends over and we'd play board games all night - but always keeping an eye on the tape recorder so we'd be able to switch tapes at the right point so as not to miss any songs.
Prior art (Score:3)
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"Mr. Watson, come here. I need you."
HTTP/1.1 203 Non-Authoritative Information
What is: What SIRI said on our first date.
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"Mr. Watson, come here. I need you."
You forgot the rest...
"Mr. Watson, come here. I need you. Instructions unclear, penis stuck in acid jar."
Human whistles (Score:2)
NFC (Score:2)
Why would it need a carrier tone? (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike a modem that requires a carrier tone, two acoustic devices that need to send a couple frames of data (such as a Diffie-Hellman exchange) could easily send and receive the data with a few bursts. DACs and ADCs are good enough to be able to discern the encoded static, find errors and correct them, and pass the decoded packets along. This wouldn't be fast, but it would be good enough for creating a shared secret or just validating each other's public keys so future communications can be reliability secured without need of a CA.
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That's easy - just have the phones exchange keys over Bluetooth.
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Ok, then why do modems require a carrier tone?
You can't send a DC signal over POTS and the modulation scheme provides some inherent noise immunity.
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And how do you send a DC signal acoustically? A fan?
Amazing Development (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost like they're modulating a signal and then demodulating it. I wonder if there's a name for this sort of thing.
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It's almost like they're modulating a signal and then demodulating it. I wonder if there's a name for this sort of thing.
Well, clearly you'd want to come up with a name that combines the traits of modulating the signal and then demodulating it on the receiving end. I'll suggest... oh... the sigulator.
"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete" (Score:2)
"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"... that is the code for activating the system...
Gives new meaning to acoustic coupling . . . (Score:2)
Everyone's already noticed that this is just an acoustically coupled modem setup. But this is better. Put the receiver of one by the speaker of the other and vice-versa. Now you've got two phones literally coupling, like 69, soixante-neuf, right there on the table at Starbucks.
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Everyone's already noticed that this is just an acoustically coupled modem setup. But this is better. Put the receiver of one by the speaker of the other and vice-versa. Now you've got two phones literally coupling, like 69, soixante-neuf, right there on the table at Starbucks.
The only thing that could make it better is if the "self jamming" sounds like moaning...
New developments (Score:2)
I hope this thing works faster than 300 baud
Third-party Hardware (Score:2)
Shall we.... (Score:2)
Ordering (Score:2)
the drive-through speaker systems need to be bette (Score:2)
the speaker systems the drive-through speaker systems need to be better for that to work. Some of them are real bad.
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At that point, why not have the order transmit electronically to the restaurant. You'd select the McDonald's that you want to order from (the app could pre-select a nearby one and you could override that if you preferred a different one), place your order, and you'd get a confirmation number. The order would appear on that restaurant's order screen and they would prepare it. By the time you arrived, your order would be ready to pick up. You could even tie it in with your credit card so that the meal is
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(Just don't order McDonald's food!)
Fixed that for you :)
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why??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't all these devices have bluetooth transceivers already?
It's like my washing machine? (Score:2, Interesting)
By jove! They've invented acoustic coupled modems! (Score:2)
By jove! They've invented acoustic coupled modems!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler [wikipedia.org]
Someone has been watching War Games again!
More secure... (Score:2)
Near field communication always sounded like a bad idea. This tells me that it is worse than I imagined.
If an acoustic coupling method/process is an improvement then the security of near field communication is in a sad state indeed.
OR this is a sad attempt to promote a patented standard to extract more $$ from hither and yon...
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Establish trusted keys, encrypt the content, and then use whatever method you wish.
Security should not rest on the security of the channel.
And the new technology is called... (Score:3)
Cell69, because that's what your phones do to make it work.
Would work with light, too (Score:2)
I could imagine the ambient light sensor and a flickering backlight being used to send messages in a similar (and perhaps less annoying way) too.
It has been around for a while (Score:2)
This tech is old, they are called "ringtones" by others. They transfer information quite reliably telling others, "The phone is owned by a total *sshole" when certain things play with near 100% accuracy. MS is probably going to use this to patent ringtones, and start suing android vendors.....
-Charlie
I am amazed NFC is "A Thing" (Score:2)
This is neat, although (as others have pointed out) not exactly a new idea. In a world where all cell phones have a speaker and microphone under software control (and in most cases, an accelerometer, supporting a "clink to sync" mechanism for short-term pairing), how did the concept of NFC, i.e. a separate antenna*, receiver chip and extremely application-specific software stack, ever get off the ground?
The typical adult human cannot hear frequencies above about 15KHz (a child can - anyone remember that fly
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You can do acoustic data sharing with a basic app, so all smartphones will have it sooner or later.
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Microsoft Research has some of the most intelligent minds in the world. You can trust what someone at MS Research says most of the time.
The rest of the company takes that and puts marketing on it, and then you can't trust a single letter in the company name to be accurate, let alone what they say.
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India[ns] have been around for ages?
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I have a Polar bicycle computer that is over 5 years old.
Did you miss a 0 out?
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I was surprised Mississippi even had researchers.