Proving co-location by context comparison Seminar Report

Due to practical demands, usability in security systems is reconsidered by researchers in recent years. Given the three prevailing short range communication technologies Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth, Zero-Interaction Authentication (ZIA) is proposed for a subset of their application scenarios. Nevertheless, relay attacks especially ”ghost-and-leech” have emerged as threats against ZIA model. In this paper, we will present the co-location-based solution to defense ZIA against relay attacks. The idea is to verify the co-location of two principals involved in authentication by comparing their contextual features. The contextual features (known as context tags) are extracted and synthesized from the sensing data of related contextual attributes . We will present 6 categories of context tags (audio, light, GPS, acceleration, wireless broadcast traffic, and nearby deviceIDs) with principles, proof-of concept experiments and specific application scenarios. We will also evaluate the advantages and limitations of each context tag, and discuss probable problems for our solution. Finally, we will introduce our experiment on BlueProximity, a Bluetooth computer lock application, in order to demonstrate the probable attacks and the feasibility of contextual co-location-based authentication.