Frictionless Authentication Systems: Emerging Trends, Research Challenges and Opportunities

Authentication and authorization are critical security layers to protect a wide range of online systems, services and content. However, the increased prevalence of wearable and mobile devices, the expectations of a frictionless experience and the diverse user environments will challenge the way users are authenticated. Consumers demand secure and privacy-aware access from any device, whenever and wherever they are, without any obstacles. This paper reviews emerging trends and challenges with frictionless authentication systems and identifies opportunities for further research related to the enrollment of users, the usability of authentication schemes, as well as security and privacy trade-offs of mobile and wearable continuous authentication systems.Comment: published at the 11th International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies (SECURWARE 2017

Implicit Smartphone User Authentication with Sensors and Contextual Machine Learning

Authentication of smartphone users is important because a lot of sensitive data is stored in the smartphone and the smartphone is also used to access various cloud data and services. However, smartphones are easily stolen or co-opted by an attacker. Beyond the initial login, it is highly desirable to re-authenticate end-users who are continuing to access security-critical services and data. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication system for implicit, continuous authentication of the smartphone user based on behavioral characteristics, by leveraging the sensors already ubiquitously built into smartphones. We propose novel context-based authentication models to differentiate the legitimate smartphone owner versus other users. We systematically show how to achieve high authentication accuracy with different design alternatives in sensor and feature selection, machine learning techniques, context detection and multiple devices. Our system can achieve excellent authentication performance with 98.1% accuracy with negligible system overhead and less than 2.4% battery consumption.Comment: Published on the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.0352

Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications

The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Biometrics for internet‐of‐things security: A review

The large number of Internet‐of‐Things (IoT) devices that need interaction between smart devices and consumers makes security critical to an IoT environment. Biometrics offers an interesting window of opportunity to improve the usability and security of IoT and can play a significant role in securing a wide range of emerging IoT devices to address security challenges. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive survey on the current biometrics research in IoT security, especially focusing on two important aspects, authentication and encryption. Regarding authentication, contemporary biometric‐based authentication systems for IoT are discussed and classified based on different biometric traits and the number of biometric traits employed in the system. As for encryption, biometric‐cryptographic systems, which integrate biometrics with cryptography and take advantage of both to provide enhanced security for IoT, are thoroughly reviewed and discussed. Moreover, challenges arising from applying biometrics to IoT and potential solutions are identified and analyzed. With an insight into the state‐of‐the‐art research in biometrics for IoT security, this review paper helps advance the study in the field and assists researchers in gaining a good understanding of forward‐looking issues and future research directions