Looks Good To Me: Authentication for Augmented Reality

Abstract

Augmented reality is poised to become a dominant computing paradigm over the next decade. With promises of three-dimensional graphics and interactive interfaces, augmented reality experiences will rival the very best science fiction novels. This breakthrough also brings in unique challenges on how users can authenticate one another to share rich content between augmented reality headsets. Traditional authentication protocols fall short when there is no common central entity or when access to the central authentication server is not available or desirable. Looks Good To Me (LGTM) is an authentication protocol that leverages the unique hardware and context provided with augmented reality headsets to bring innate human trust mechanisms into the digital world to solve authentication in a usable and secure way. LGTM works over point to point wireless communication so users can authenticate one another in a variety of circumstances and is designed with usability at its core, requiring users to perform only two actions: one to initiate and one to confirm. Users intuitively authenticate one another, using seemingly only each other's faces, but under the hood LGTM uses a combination of facial recognition and wireless localization to bootstrap trust from a wireless signal, to a location, to a face, for secure and usable authentication.