A mutual authentication method on wireless visible area network

A spread of mobile terminal equipped with short-range wireless communication device has increased the demand for file sharing through local and temporary wireless network. However, due to the ease of sniffing in such network, the file sharing has a risk of leaking in the communication. In this paper, we focus on secure face-to-face information exchange especially in wireless visible area network (WVAC) which is locally and temporarily constructed to communicate with visible users. More concretely, we propose a mutual authentication method for WVAC. The proposed method enables a communication pair to mutually authenticate their public keys without any certificate authority. The main idea of the proposed method is to authenticate the public keys of the communication pair based on trusting relationship obtained by a face-to-face situation. Additionally, users obviously can comprehend authenticated public keys for others due to man-in-the-loop approach included in the process of the authentication.