PIANO: Proximity-based User Authentication on Voice-Powered Internet-of-Things Devices
This addresses access control for users of voice-powered IoT devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing proximity-based authentication methods.
The paper tackles user authentication on voice-powered IoT devices by proposing PIANO, a proximity-based method that uses acoustic signals to estimate distance between devices and grants access if within a threshold, with evaluations showing it is secure, reliable, personalizable, and efficient.
Voice is envisioned to be a popular way for humans to interact with Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. We propose a proximity-based user authentication method (called PIANO) for access control on such voice-powered IoT devices. PIANO leverages the built-in speaker, microphone, and Bluetooth that voice-powered IoT devices often already have. Specifically, we assume that a user carries a personal voice-powered device (e.g., smartphone, smartwatch, or smartglass), which serves as the user's identity. When another voice-powered IoT device of the user requires authentication, PIANO estimates the distance between the two devices by playing and detecting certain acoustic signals; PIANO grants access if the estimated distance is no larger than a user-selected threshold. We implemented a proof-of-concept prototype of PIANO. Through theoretical and empirical evaluations, we find that PIANO is secure, reliable, personalizable, and efficient.