FADEWICH: Fast Deauthentication over the Wireless Channel
Mauro Conti, Giulio Lovisotto, Ivan Martinovic, Gene Tsudik

TL;DR
FADEWICH is an automatic, unobtrusive deauthentication system using wireless signal properties to prevent unauthorized access when users leave their workstations, achieving rapid detection without user devices.
Contribution
It introduces the first wireless-based, device-free deauthentication system that is fast, unobtrusive, and effective against lunchtime attacks.
Findings
Deauthenticates users within six seconds in shared office environments
Requires only nine inexpensive wireless sensors for effective operation
Successfully prevents lunchtime attacks in tested scenarios
Abstract
Both authentication and deauthentication are instrumental for preventing unauthorized access to computer and data assets. While there are obvious motivating factors for using strong authentication mechanisms, convincing users to deauthenticate is not straight-forward, since deauthentication is not considered mandatory. A user who leaves a logged-in workstation unattended (especially for a short time) is typically not inconvenienced in any way; in fact, the other way around: no annoying reauthentication is needed upon return. However, an unattended workstation is trivially susceptible to the well-known "lunchtime attack" by any nearby adversary who simply takes over the departed user's log-in session. At the same time, since deathentication does not intrinsically require user secrets, it can, in principle, be made unobtrusive. To this end, this paper designs the first automatic user…
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