Emerging Paradigms in Wearable Security: Adaptable and Secure Sandboxing for On-the-Fly Collaboration Among Wearables

We propose a novel security protocol for on-the-fly collaboration among wearables, addressing significant security challenges, such as data exposure and false information injection. Leveraging wearables’ position on the body, our protocol ensures secure collaboration and enables new possibilities for ubiquitous computing.

Wearable devices are becoming increasingly versatile by enhancing their functionality through various sensors and interfaces. The advent of compact artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, such as Analog MAX780001 and Google Coral Micro,2 is making these devices smarter by enabling AI even in small wearable devices. Considering the exponential growth of wearables, we envision a new class of applications that leverage an on-the-fly collaboration of these wearable devices, as shown in Figure 1. This collaboration harnesses the collective strengths of the wearable ecosystem, enabling even simple devices to provide enriched services. For example, an application can seamlessly monitor a variety of health and activity levels by dynamically combining various sensors on distributed wearables, such as fitness bands, smartwatches, and hearing aids, based on their availability. Similarly, the application can provide alerts via different interfaces dynamically, e.g., voice feedback when earbuds are in use or haptic feedback when a smart ring is detected.