Passphone: Outsourcing Phone-Based Web Authentication While Protecting User Privacy

This work introduces Passphone, a new smartphone-based authentication scheme that outsources user verification to a trusted third party without sacrificing privacy: neither can the trusted third party learn the relation between users and service providers, nor can service providers learn those of their users to others. When employed as a second factor in conjunction with, for instance, passwords as a first factor, our scheme maximizes the deployability of two-factor authentication for service providers while maintaining user privacy. We conduct a twofold formal analysis of our scheme, the first regarding its general security, and the second regarding anonymity and unlinkability of its users. Moreover, we provide an automatic analysis using AVISPA, a comparative evaluation to existing schemes under Bonneau et al.’s framework, and an evaluation of a prototypical implementation.