PEAR, my first publication!

During my time at school, I participate in research. I have been doing this since freshman year, and have been co-author on a few papers, but have never been lead author. Well, that is now changing.

Yesterday, I submitted a paper to the 2010 ACM DIM (Digital Identity Management) workshop. My paper was  about a project I have been working on the last semester. I used several different things in my projects, some of which I have written about before. Rather than try to explain the project now, I will show you the abstract. I’ll post the full paper once it is either officially accepted or rejected.

PEAR: A Hardware Based Protocol Authentication System

Abstract

As users have to manage an increasing number of ac-

counts, they have to balance password security and pass-

word usability. As such, many users use insecure pass-

words resulting in their accounts and data being vulnerable

to unauthorized accesses. In this paper, we present Phys-

ically Enhanced Authentication Ring, or PEAR, a system

that alleviates this problem. We leverage Physically Un-

clonable Functions (PUF) to create unclonable hardware

devices, which users use to authenticate. Using a hardware

device, our system uses zero-knowledge proofs, which pro-

vide better security than traditional passwords, yet users

must only enter a simple PIN. As such, our system is very

usable and imposes little to no burden on end users and

service providers. We present transaction levels on top of

PEAR of as an extension and then discuss some other work

that could be done in the future.