AcousAuth: An acoustic-based mobile application for user authentication

Abstract

Short-range wireless communication technologies have been used in many security-sensitive smartphone applications and services such as contactless micro payment and device pairing. Typically, the data confidentiality of existing short-range communication systems relies on key-exchange then encryption mechanism, which is inefficient, especially for short communication sessions. In this work, we present AcousAuth, a smartphone empowered system designed for personal authentication. AcousAuth adopts the emerging friendly jamming technique from radio communication for data confidentiality and it features a seamless, faster, easier and safer user authentication process without the need for special infrastructure. Our system is intended to provide security assurances comparable to or greater than that of conventional authentication systems while offering the same user experience as inputing a password alone. AcousAuth provides a purely software-based solution to secure smartphone short-range communication without key agreement phase and it is potentially well suited for legacy mobile devices. Despite the computational restrictions and bandwidth of mobile device, our mobile application is able to maintain real-time performance.