Listening Watch
Prakash Sunder Shrestha, Nitesh Saxena · 2018
Reducing the level of user effort involved in traditional two-factor authentication (TFA) constitutes an important research topic. A recent effort in this direction leverages ambient sounds to detect the proximity between the second factor device (phone) and the login terminal (browser), and eliminates the need for the user to transfer PIN codes. This approach is highly usable, but is completely vulnerable against far-near attackers, i.e., ones who are remotely located and can guess the victim's audio environment or make the phone create predictable sounds (e.g., ringers), and those who are in physical proximity of the user.