Title: Proximity-based authentication of mobile devices

Authors: Adin Scannell, Alexander Varshavsky, Anthony LaMarca, Eyal De Lara

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 40 St. George Street, Toronto, M5S 2E4 Ontario, Canada. ' AT&T Labs Research, 180 Park Ave. Building 103, Florham Park, 07932 NJ, USA. ' Intel Research Seattle, 1100 NE 45th St., Sixth Floor, Seattle, 98105 WA, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 40 St. George Street, Toronto, M5S 2E4 Ontario, Canada

Abstract: Securing interactions between devices that do not know each other a priori is an important and challenging task. We present Amigo, a technique to authenticate co-located devices using knowledge of their shared radio environment as proof of physical proximity. We present evaluation results that show that our technique is robust against a range of passive and active attacks. The key advantages of our technique are that it does not require any additional hardware to be present on the devices beyond the radios that are already used for communication, it does not require user involvement to verify the validity of the authentication process, and it is not vulnerable to eavesdropping.

Keywords: proximity-based authentication; security; secure pairing; radio authentication; mobile devices; co-located devices; passive attacks; active attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2009.023422

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2009 Vol.4 No.1/2, pp.4 - 16

Published online: 23 Feb 2009 *

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