Wireless Accessory Key Sharing for Crowdsourced Location Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Wireless accessory devices, such as wireless earbuds and smartwatches, cannot be tracked when lost or stolen due to their inability to determine location and communicate with remote tracking services over a wide area network.
Innovation Solution
A system that enables secure crowdsourced locator services by sharing cryptographic keys with a share recipient device to allow it to perform capabilities on the wireless accessory, including determining a share recipient, creating a storage record, sending a share request, and marking the record as accepted to enable the recipient to locate the accessory.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If wireless accessory devices use peer-to-peer communications with wireless devices, then they can communicate directly without network infrastructure, but they cannot be tracked when lost or stolen because they lack wide area network communication capability
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a server as an intermediary that receives location data from finder devices and makes it accessible to owner devices. The server acts as a mediator between the wireless accessory (which cannot communicate directly with remote services) and the owner device, enabling tracking functionality without requiring the accessory to have wide area network communication capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent enables other wireless devices to act as finder devices that automatically detect and report the location of lost accessories. These finder devices perform the tracking function autonomously by detecting beacon signals from the accessory and submitting location data to the server, allowing the system to self-organize tracking capabilities without requiring the lost accessory to actively communicate.
2Reliability
If cryptographic keys are shared with multiple devices for locating wireless accessories, then tracking capability is improved, but security risk increases due to potential key compromise
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the cryptographic key into multiple parts and distributes them to different finder devices. Each finder device receives only a portion of the key, and the complete key is reconstructed only when needed for locating the accessory. This segmentation ensures that compromise of one finder device does not expose the entire key, thereby reducing security risk while maintaining tracking capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary key distribution to finder devices before they are needed for tracking. The cryptographic key parts are pre-shared with authorized finder devices through secure channels, and the system is prepared in advance to handle tracking requests. This preliminary action ensures that when a loss occurs, the tracking infrastructure is already in place and operational.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments described herein provide for a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions to cause one or more processor to perform operations to share a set of keys used to communicate with a wireless accessory device. By sharing the set of keys, functionality of the wireless accessory device can be delegated by an owner to other individuals.