TY - GEN

T1 - Checksum gestures

T2 - continuous gestures as an out-of-band channel for secure pairing

AU - Ahmed, Imtiaj

AU - Ye, Yina

AU - Bhattacharya, Sourav

AU - Asokan, N.

AU - Jacucci, Giulio

AU - Nurmi, Petteri

AU - Tarkoma, Sasu

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - authentication

KW - device association

KW - gesture encoding

KW - gesture interaction

KW - usable security

U2 - 10.1145/2750858.2807521

DO - 10.1145/2750858.2807521

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

SN - 9781450335744

SP - 391

EP - 401

BT - UbiComp '15 Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

PB - ACM

CY - New York

ER -