EAGER: Establishing Secure Wireless Connections via Playful User Engagement

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Pairing is a fundamental problem of establishing secure, i.e., authenticated and confidential, connection between two previously unassociated devices over a short-range wireless radio channel. Lack of prior security context or a common trust infrastructure triggers the threat of man-in-the-middle attacks. Addressing this threat necessitates user involvement in the device pairing process. Despite extensive prior research, the pairing problem has not been duly addressed so far. The fundamental difficulty stems from a complete lack of user motivation in the pairing process, which leads to different forms of human errors, undermining the overall security and/or usability of the process. This project aims to address the problem of secure device pairing via playful user engagement. First, it is investigating the use of a rewarding functionality based on the principles of extrinsic motivation to improve the security and usability of traditional device pairing mechanisms. Second, in order to make secure device pairing fun and enjoyable, it is adopting computer games to facilitate user involvement. In other words, the user would be asked to play a simple game which accomplishes the pairing task as a side effect. Specifically, a suite of playful solutions for device pairing are being designed and prototyped in this project. The project is providing advanced mentoring to many students as well as integrating the proposed research with ongoing security curriculum, enabling participants to acquire rare skills at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace. It is also facilitating outreach to high school and K-12 students, and minority populations. The prototypes arising from this project have the potential to be deployed in practice, making device pairing not only usable but also pleasurable for day-to-day users.