Research

VoltKey is a technique to generate secure authentication and encryption keys from noise on the 120VAC wall outlets. It allows new IoT devices to be plugged in and automatically join an existing wireless network with zero configuration required.

Papers

Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps
Yucheng Yang, Jack West, George K Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith, Kassem Fawaz ACM PoPETS, 2022

Establishing trust in vehicle-to-vehicle coordination: a sensor fusion approach
Jakob Veselsky, Jack West, Isaac Ahlgren, Abhinav Goel, Wenxin Jiang, Kyuin Lee, Younghyun Kim, Yung-Hsiang Lu, James C. Davis, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith ACM DI-CPS (Workshop on Data-Driven and Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Cities), Virtual, 2022

AeroKey: Using Ambient Electromagnetic Radiation for Secure and Usable Wireless Device Authentication
Kyuin Lee, Yucheng Yang, Omkar Prabhune, Aishwarya Lekshmi Chithra, Jack West, Kassem Fawaz, Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee, and Younghyun Kim
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2021

Moonshine: An Online Randomness Distiller for Zero-Involvement Authentication
Jack West, Kyuin Lee, Suman Banerjee, Younghyun Kim, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith
ACM IPSN, 2021

ivPair: Context-Based Fast Intra-Vehicle Device Pairing for Secure Wireless Connectivity
Kyuin Lee, Neil Klingensmith, Dong He, Suman Banerjee, and Younghyun Banerjee
WiSec '20: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 2020

VoltKey: Continuous Secret Key Generation based on Power Line Noise for Zero- Involvement Pairing and Authentication
Kyuin Lee, Neil Klingensmith, Younghyun Kim, and Suman Banerjee
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2019

Panda is a technique to reduce the energy required to sample analog signals on battery-powered IoT devices. We sample the analog signal nonuniformly in time which reduces the energy overhead of repeatedly waking and sleeping the microcontroller. Using algorithms we developed, we can reconstruct frequency domain information from the nonuniformly spaced samples.

Papers

A Method for Energy-Efficient Sampling of Analog to Digital Converters
Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee
ACM Transactions on Sustainable Computing 2019

PANDA: Performance Acceleration through Nonuniform Data Acquisition
Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee
ACM eEnergy 2018

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Hermes is a hypervisor for MCU-based systems with real-time requirements. The goal of Hermes is to manage tradeoffs between performance and flexibility in software that runs on embedded systems. Bare-metal software often has the best performance—low I/O latency, less CPU and memory overhead, etc. RTOS-based software has comparatively higher flexibility in terms of its ability to share resources and manage multiple jobs, but often sacrifices latency. Hermes aims to provide software developers with the option to run some portions of code in a bare-metal like environment with minimal latency while allowing other jobs to run within a more flexible RTOS.

Papers

Using Virtualized Task Isolation to Improve Responsiveness in Mobile and IoT Software
Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee
ACM IoTDI, Montreal, QC, CA, April 2019

A Hypervisor-Based Privacy Agent for Mobile and IoT Systems
Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee
ACM HotMobile, Santa Cruz, CA, February 2019

Hermes: A Real Time Hypervisor for Mobile and IoT Systems
Neil Klingensmith, Suman Banerjee
ACM HotMobile, Tempe, AZ, February 2018

Existing water softeners use open-loop controllers that do not include water quality sensors to trigger regeneration. As a result, they generally regenerate too frequently, wasting salt and water and polluting the environment. Emonix aims to reduce the frequency of water softener regenerations by sensing water quality and applying domain knowledge to trigger regenerations at optimal times. The sensor readings, which may be noisy or inaccurate, are processed by backend algorithms to accurately predict when regeneration is required.

Papers

SPOCK: A Sensor Value Prediction and Online Control Algorithm for Building Resource Management
Neil Klingensmith, Ananthraghavan Sridhar, Zachary LaVallee, Suman Banerjee
ACM BuildSys, Stanford, CA, November 2016

Water or Slime? A platform for automating water treatment systems
Neil Klingensmith, Ananthraghavan Sridhar, Zachary LaVallee, Suman Banerjee
ACM BuildSys, Seoul, KR, November 2015

Papers

Hot, Cold and In Between: Enabling Fine-Grained Environmental Control in Homes for Efficiency and Comfort
Neil Klingensmith, Joseph Bomber, Suman Banerjee
ACM eEnergy, Cambridge, UK, June 2014