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MS Researchers Develop Acoustic Data Transfer System For Phones
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."
It's amazing what comes back as "new developments"
I don't have time to make a sig
So they reinvented chirp.io ?
"modem"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN.
...did they patent it yet?
Of course - It's on a cell phone!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217790/Sound_based_system_promises_chipless_NFC_now
You can already transfer music between phones like this, but it's quite lossy depending on the quality of your speaker.
"Mr. Watson, come here. I need you."
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Don't all these devices have bluetooth transceivers already?
My LG front loader has a way to send diagnostic data to the factory; you hold the phone's mic to the washer and it sends data to the factory (which you presumably have to call first).
Cell69, because that's what your phones do to make it work.