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Passive RFID technology is widely used in user authentication and access control. We propose RF-Rhythm, a secure and usable two-factor RFID authentication system with strong resilience to lost/stolen/cloned RFID cards. In RF-Rhythm, each legitimate user performs a sequence of taps on his/her RFID card according to a self-chosen secret melody. Such rhythmic taps can induce phase changes in the backscattered signals, which the RFID reader can detect to recover the user’s tapping rhythm. In addition to verifying the RFID card’s identification information as usual, the backend server compares the extracted tapping rhythm with what it acquires in the user enrollment phase. The user passes authentication checks if and only if both verifications succeed. We also propose a novel phase-hopping protocol in which the RFID reader emits Continuous Wave (CW) with random phases for extracting the user’s secret tapping rhythm. Our protocol can prevent a capable adversary from extracting and then replaying a legitimate tapping rhythm from sniffed RFID signals. Comprehensive user experiments confirm the high security and usability of RF-Rhythm with false-positive and false-negative rates close to zero.
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AEROKEY: Using Ambient Electromagnetic Radiation for Secure and Usable Wireless Device Authentication
Wireless connectivity is becoming common in increasingly diverse personal devices, enabling various interoperation- and Internet-based applications and services. More and more interconnected devices are simultaneously operated by a single user with short-lived connections, making usable device authentication methods imperative to ensure both high security and seamless user experience. Unfortunately, current authentication methods that heavily require human involvement, in addition to form factor and mobility constraints, make this balance hard to achieve, often forcing users to choose between security and convenience. In this work, we present a novel over-the-air device authentication scheme named AEROKEY that achieves both high security and high usability. With virtually no hardware overhead, AEROKEY leverages ubiquitously observable ambient electromagnetic radiation to autonomously generate spatiotemporally unique secret that can be derived only by devices that are closely located to each other. Devices can make use of this unique secret to form the basis of a symmetric key, making the authentication procedure more practical, secure and usable with no active human involvement. We propose and implement essential techniques to overcome challenges in realizing AEROKEY on low-cost microcontroller units, such as poor time synchronization, lack of precision analog front-end, and inconsistent sampling rates. Our real-world experiments demonstrate reliable authentication as well as its robustness against various realistic adversaries with low equal-error rates of 3.4% or less and usable authentication time of as low as 24 s.
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- PAR ID:
- 10326397
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 29
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3517254
