Pair-Fi: A novel approach to secure wireless device pairing wins Best Paper Award at WiSec 2026

The award-winning work enables smartphones to establish secure wireless connections faster and more reliably using their built-in Wi-Fi hardware

21 July 2026

The paper “Pair-Fi: Integrity Code Protected Secure Device Pairing via SDR-Enabled Wi-Fi Chips on Smartphones“, co-authored by Jakob Link, Florentin Putz, and IMDEA Networks Research Professor Matthias Hollick, has received the Best Full Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec 2026), recognizing outstanding research contributions in wireless and mobile security.

The research introduces Pair-Fi, a novel technique that enables smartphones to establish secure wireless connections faster and more reliably by unlocking advanced capabilities of their built-in Wi-Fi hardware. The approach addresses long-standing challenges in secure device pairing, a process used when smartphones, wearables and other connected devices establish trusted wireless connections.

Prof. Matthias Hollick comments: “While we see lots of progress in the general area of usability of smartphones, securely paring devices is still a rather cumbersome process. It lacks usability and is hard to deploy, so users often just skip it. With Pair-Fi, we demonstrate that device pairing on commodity smartphones can be easy while still giving strong security guarantees. We invite vendors to use our method, because it will benefit cybersecurity in general.”

Current pairing methods often involve trade-offs between security, speed and robustness. Acoustic approaches are easy to deploy but are sensitive to environmental noise and offer limited data rates, while existing Wi-Fi-based techniques lack the timing precision required to implement strong integrity guarantees on off-the-shelf devices.

Pair-Fi overcomes these limitations by enabling software-defined radio (SDR)-like capabilities directly on commodity smartphone Wi-Fi chips through firmware modifications. This allows the transmission of integrity codes with unprecedented timing precision, resulting in faster, more reliable, and more resilient secure pairing. The researchers validated the system on commercial smartphones, including Google Pixel 7, demonstrating robust performance under realistic conditions.

The award highlights the significance of this contribution to practical wireless security, paving the way for faster and more secure interactions between smartphones, wearables, and other connected devices.