Go anywhere: user-verifiable authentication over distance-free channel for mobile devices

• Published in: Personal and ubiquitous computing 2013-06, Vol.17 (5), p.933-943
• Main Authors: Kang, Sukin, Kim, Jonguk, Hong, Manpyo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Authentication; Authentication protocols; Channels; Computer Science; Cryptography; Devices; Human; Information systems; Mobile communication systems; Mobile Computing; Network security; Original Article; Personal Computing; Prototypes; Smartphones; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
• ISSN: 1617-4909; 1617-4917
• DOI: 10.1007/s00779-012-0531-4

Current mobile technology gives us ubiquitous services with personal mobile devices such as smart phones, tablet PCs, and laptops. With these mobile devices, the human users may wish to exchange sensitive data with others (e.g., their friends or their colleagues) over a secure channel. Public key cryptography is a good solution for establishing this secure channel. However, it is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack, if the entities have no shared information. A number of techniques based on human-assisted out-of-band channels have been proposed to solve this problem. Unfortunately, these works have a common shortcoming: The human users must be colocated in close proximity. In this paper, we focus on how to construct a distance - free channel , which is not location - limited for establishing a secure channel between two users (devices). The proposed distance-free channel provides identification and authentication of the devices at the different locations using taken pictures or pre-stored images. The human user participates in the authentication process by sending and verifying an image. We describe the prototype implementation operated on a smart phone and show the experimental results when actually two smart phones share a common key using Diffie–Hellman key agreement over the proposed distance-free channel.