On community-based authentication factor
Khalid Hammad Alkhattabi · Digital Collections of Colorado (Colorado State University) · 2016
In this thesis, we explore the use of community Information as a factor for authentication and authorization, called it Community-based Factor (CBF), and resent the design and implementation of a Community-based Authentication and Authorization (CAA) System which utilizes CBF.CAA is a system that enables a user to generate a CBF from the people of his/her community group for authentication and authorization purposes.CBF has been used in inherence granting scenario, court hearing, and referral in our daily life.One goal of the research project is to investigate whether the critical CBF information can be gathered in real time over today's mobile networks and internet.CAA is a system, which on receiving an access request, can send SMS, utilizes Apple Push Notification service (APNs), and email to a group of pre-designated users for access approval.The weights of the approval can be adjusted based on the location proximity of the users, APNs-OPT, and Facebook SSO.Experiments are conducted among a group of colleagues to evaluate these different methods for their effectiveness.The results show that APNs is most secure and efficient, followed by SMS.Email does not meet the requirement.Our results found that the minimum time to login in real time with CBF is around 72 seconds when requiring authentication from two group members.The response rate is very important for CBF.With 16 participants in our experiment, the best result we got is 60% of participants respond within one minute or less.These preliminary results show CBF data can be gathered in real time which contradicts to our original hypothesis.We believe the usability of CBF for authentication in real time can be improved with the growth of smart phones and the behavior of the mobile users.In this I want to thank all the people who helped, encouraged, and supported me to make my dream become a reality.First of all, I would like to thank my family overseas, my dad, mam, brothers, and my sisters for their support and for their love.Also, I would like to extend my thanks to my family here at Colorado Springs, my wife (Nadia) and my son (Kenan) for being patience, understanding, and acceptance of my being a busy student spending most of his time doing research.I especially would like to thank them for their love, support, and encouragement that they consistently provided to me.I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Edward Chow for all his advice, assistance, patience, and encouragement to me during my