Exploiting Human Factors in User Authentication

Our overarching issue in security is the human factor – and dealing with it is perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face today. Human factor is often described as the weakest part of a security system and users are often described as the weakest link in the security chain. In this thesis, we focus on two problems which are caused by human factors in user authentication and propose respective solutions. a) Secrecy information inference attack – publicly available information can be used to infer some secrecy information about the user. b) Coercion attack – where an attacker forces a user to handover his/her secret information such as account details and password. In the secrecy information inference attack, an attacker can use publicly available data to infer secrecy information about a victim. We should be prudent in choosing any information as secrecy information in user authentication. In this work, we exploit public data extracted from Facebook to infer users’ interests. Such interests can also found on their profile pages but such pages are often private. Our experiments conducted on over more than 34, 000 public pages collected from Facebook show that our inference technique can infer interests which are often hidden by users with moderate accuracy. Using the inferred interests, we also demonstrate a secrecy information inference attack to break a preference based backup authentication system Blue MoonTM. To mitigate the effect of secrecy information inference attack, we propose a new authentication mechanism based on user’s cellphone usage data which is often private. The system generates memorable and dynamic fingerprints which can be used to create authentication challenges. In particular, in this work, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users to be used for authentication credentials. We demonstrate the application of memorable fingerprints by designing an authentication application on top of it. We conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data from 58 Symbian and Android smartphone users. Results show that the fingerprints generated are remembered by the user to some extent and that they were moderately secure against attacks even by family members and close friends. The second problem which we focus in this thesis is human vulnerability to coercion attacks. In such attacks, the user is forcefully asked by an attacker to reveal the secret/key to gain access to the system. Most authentication mechanisms today are vulnerable to coercion attacks. We present a novel approach in generating cryptographic keys to fight against coercion attacks. Our technique incorporates a measure of user’s emotional status using skin conductance (which changes when the user is under coercion) into the key generation process. A preliminary user study with 39 subjects was conducted which shows that our approach has moderate false acceptance and false rejection rates. Furthermore, to meet the demand of scalability and usability, many real-world authentication systems have adopted the idea of responsibility shifting, where a user’s responsibility of authentication is shifted to another entity, usually in case of failure of the primary authentication method. In a responsibility shifting authentication scenario, a human helper who is involved in regaining access, is vulnerable to coercion attacks. In this work, we report our user study on 29 participants which investigates the helper’s emotional status when being coerced to assist in an attack. Results show that the coercion causes involuntary skin conductance fluctuation on the helper, which indicates that he/she is nervous and stressed. The results from the two studies show that the skin conductance is a viable approach to fight against coercion attacks in user authentication.