Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Checksum gestures

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Checksum gestures: continuous gestures as an out-of-band channel for secure pairing

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNConference contribution/Paperpeer-review

Published
  • Imtiaj Ahmed
  • Yina Ye
  • Sourav Bhattacharya
  • N. Asokan
  • Giulio Jacucci
  • Petteri Nurmi
  • Sasu Tarkoma
Close
Publication date2015
Host publicationUbiComp '15 Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM
Pages391-401
Number of pages12
ISBN (print)9781450335744
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We propose the use of a single continuous gesture as a novel, intuitive, and efficient mechanism to authenticate a secure communication channel. Our approach builds on a novel algorithm for encoding (at least 20-bits) authentication information as a single continuous gesture, referred to as a checksum gesture. By asking the user to perform the generated gesture, a secure channel can be authenticated. Results from a controlled user experiment (N = 13 participants, 1022 trials) demonstrate the feasibility of our technique, showing over 90% success rate in establishing a secure communication channel despite relying on complex gesture patterns. The authentication times of our method are over three-folds faster than with previous gesture-based solutions. The average execution time of a gesture is 5:7 seconds in our study, which is comparable to the input time of conventional text input based PIN authentication. Our approach is particularly well-suited for scenarios involving wearable devices that lack conventional input capabilities, e.g., pairing a smartwatch with an interactive display.