Single-Sign-On in Smart Homes using Continuous Authentication

Abstract

Modern ubiquitous computing environments are increasingly populated with smart devices that need to know the identity of users interacting with them. At the same time, the number of authentications that a user needs to perform increases, as nowadays devices such as smart TVs require authentication which was not the case in earlier times. Even for single-person households, the need to authenticate against present smart devices in the environment appears at regular intervals, ranging from TVs to voice assistants, to gaming consoles. To reduce the need for repeated authentication, we explore the concept of a system that allows the sharing of users’ authenticated identity information between smart devices, similar to the concept of Single-Sign-On on the internet. Following a preliminary field study, we show that such a system can decrease the number of necessary authentications in a ubiquitous computing environment by 84.4%, increasing usability and security.