A Preliminary Investigation of Distributed and Cooperative User Authentication

Smartphones and other highly mobile yet sophisticated technologies are rapidly spreading through society and increasingly finding their way into pockets and handbags. As reliance upon these intensifies and familiarity grows, human nature dictates that more and more personal details and information is now to be found upon such devices. The need to secure and protect this valuable and desirable information is becoming ever more prevalent. Building upon previous work which proposed a novel approach to user authentication, an Authentication Aura, this paper investigates the latent security potential contained in surrounding devices in everyday life.