Camera Based Two Factor Authentication Through Mobile and Wearable Devices

TL;DR

Pixie is a camera-based two-factor authentication system for mobile and wearable devices that uses images of physical objects called trinkets, combining graphical password and physical token methods without requiring special hardware.

Contribution

Pixie introduces a novel, hardware-independent authentication method using image-based recognition of user-selected trinkets, with robust feature extraction and machine learning to improve security and usability.

Findings

False accept rate below 0.09% in brute force attack

Outperforms text passwords in memorability and speed

Accurate and user-friendly in field tests

Abstract

We introduce Pixie, a novel, camera based two factor authentication solution for mobile and wearable devices. A quick and familiar user action of snapping a photo is sufficient for Pixie to simultaneously perform a graphical password authentication and a physical token based authentication, yet it does not require any expensive, uncommon hardware. Pixie establishes trust based on both the knowledge and possession of an arbitrary physical object readily accessible to the user, called trinket. Users choose their trinkets similar to setting a password, and authenticate by presenting the same trinket to the camera. The fact that the object is the trinket, is secret to the user. Pixie extracts robust, novel features from trinket images, and leverages a supervised learning classifier to effectively address inconsistencies between images of the same trinket captured in different circumstances. Pixie achieved a false accept rate below 0.09% in a brute force attack with 14.3 million authentication attempts, generated with 40,000 trinket images that we captured and collected from public datasets. We identify master images, that match multiple trinkets, and study techniques to reduce their impact. In a user study with 42 participants over 8 days in 3 sessions we found that Pixie outperforms text based passwords on memorability, speed, and user preference. Furthermore, Pixie was easily discoverable by new users and accurate under field use. Users were able to remember their trinkets 2 and 7 days after registering them, without any practice between the 3 test dates.