Revisiting context-based authentication in IoT

M Miettinen, TD Nguyen, AR Sadeghi… - Proceedings of the 55th …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Design Automation Conference, 2018dl.acm.org
The emergence of IoT poses new challenges towards solutions for authenticating numerous
very heterogeneous IoT devices to their respective trust domains. Using passwords or pre-
defined keys have drawbacks that limit their use in IoT scenarios. Recent works propose to
use contextual information about ambient physical properties of devices' surroundings as a
shared secret to mutually authenticate devices that are co-located, eg, the same room. In this
paper, we analyze these context-based authentication solutions with regard to their security …
The emergence of IoT poses new challenges towards solutions for authenticating numerous very heterogeneous IoT devices to their respective trust domains. Using passwords or pre-defined keys have drawbacks that limit their use in IoT scenarios. Recent works propose to use contextual information about ambient physical properties of devices' surroundings as a shared secret to mutually authenticate devices that are co-located, e.g., the same room. In this paper, we analyze these context-based authentication solutions with regard to their security and requirements on context quality. We quantify their achievable security based on empirical real-world data from context measurements in typical IoT environments.
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