TC: Small: Designing New Authentication Mechanisms using Hardware Capabilities in Advanced Mobile Devices

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Authentication is a quintessential problem in computer security. However, most commonly used authentication mechanisms suffer from a variety of shortcomings. Passwords, the most common authentication mechanism, are vulnerable to replay attacks. Physical authentication tokens overcome some of these problems; however, they face deployment and compatibility obstacles.Recently, advanced mobile devices have become widely available. These devices provide new hardware capabilities, such as MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) radio, a variety of sensors, and hardware authentication modules.We investigate how to take advantage of hardware capabilities in advanced mobile devices to design better authentication mechanisms. We are focusing on three types of hardware capabilities. First, certain mobile devices authenticate to their networks via built-in hardware modules. We investigate how to leverage such existing authenticating infrastructure for other authentication tasks, such as authenticating users to websites. Second, mobile devices have MIMO radio transceivers. We investigate how to use these transceivers to pair nearby mobile devices without requiring the user to enter shared secrets into the devices. Finally, many advanced mobile devices have sensors, such as accelerometers. We investigate how to design gesture-based user authentication using accelerometers.The impact of this project will be highly visible. Most current authentication mechanisms have various security, usability, and deployment problems. Our new mechanisms overcome many of these problems. Since these mechanisms are based on hardware capabilities that are increasingly common in mobile devices, they can be deployed to billions of mobile users to make their authentication tasks easier and securer.