EAGER: Establishing Secure Wireless Connections via Playful User Engagement

配对是在两个先前未关联的设备之间通过短距离无线电信道建立安全的、即经过身份验证和保密的连接的基本问题。缺乏先前的安全环境或共同的信任基础设施会触发中间人攻击的威胁。应对这一威胁需要用户参与设备配对过程。尽管之前进行了广泛的研究，但配对问题到目前为止还没有得到适当的解决。根本的困难源于配对过程中完全缺乏用户动机，这导致了不同形式的人为错误，破坏了配对过程的整体安全性和/或可用性。该项目旨在通过有趣的用户参与来解决安全设备配对的问题。首先，它正在调查基于外部激励原则的奖励功能的使用，以提高传统设备配对机制的安全性和可用性。其次，为了让安全设备配对变得有趣和愉快，它采用了电脑游戏来促进用户参与。换句话说，用户将被要求玩一个简单的游戏，作为一个副作用，它完成配对任务。具体地说，在这个项目中，一套有趣的设备配对解决方案正在设计和制作原型。该项目为许多学生提供高级指导，并将拟议的研究与正在进行的安全课程相结合，使参与者能够在人机交互和安全可信的网络空间的交叉点获得罕见的技能。它还促进了与高中生和K-12学生以及少数族裔人口的接触。该项目产生的原型具有在实践中部署的潜力，使设备配对不仅可用，而且对日常用户来说也是愉快的。

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.