Wave-for-Safe: Multisensor-based Mutual Authentication for Unmanned Delivery Vehicle Services

In recent years, the deployment of unmanned vehicle delivery services has increased unprecedentedly, leading to a need for enhanced security due to the risk of leaving high-value packages to an unauthorized third party during pickup or delivery. Existing authentication methods such as QR code and one-time password are inadequate, as they are susceptible to attacks and provide only one-way authentication. This paper, for the first time to our best knowledge, proposes Wave-for-Safe (W4S) --- a novel mutual authentication system that utilizes multi-modal sensors on both the user's smartphone and the unmanned vehicle. W4S uses random hand-waving by the legitimate user to achieve robust authentication by obtaining highly correlated sensory data measured by the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in the smartphone and sensors in the unmanned vehicle (e.g., mmWave radar and camera). We propose several novel methods to overcome challenges such as heterogeneous data processing, asynchronization, and imitating attacks. The prototype is implemented on an unmanned vehicle and various smartphones, and evaluation in different real-world scenarios shows that W4S achieves an equal error rate below 0.013 against various attacks.