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ShakeUnlock: Securely Unlock Mobile Devices by Shaking them Together

Published: 08 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The inherent weakness of typical mobile device unlocking approaches (PIN, password, graphic pattern) is that they demand time and attention, leading a majority of end users to disable them, effectively lowering device security.
We propose a method for unlocking mobile devices by shaking them together, implicitly passing the unlocked state from one device to another. One obvious use case includes a locked mobile phone and a wrist watch, which remains unlocked as long as strapped to the user's wrist. Shaking both devices together generates a one-time unlocking event for the phone without the user interacting with the screen. We explicitly analyze the usability critical impact of shaking duration with respect to the level of security. Results indicate that unlocking is possible with a true match rate of 0.795 and true non match rate of 0.867 for a shaking duration as short as two seconds.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MoMM '14: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing and Multimedia
December 2014
464 pages
ISBN:9781450330084
DOI:10.1145/2684103
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • JKU: Johannes Kepler Universität Linz

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Publication History

Published: 08 December 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Accelerometer
  2. authentication
  3. frequency domain
  4. mobile devices
  5. shaking
  6. time series analysis
  7. usability

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  • (2021)Secure and Usable Handshake Based Pairing for Wrist-Worn Smart Devices on Different UsersMobile Networks and Applications10.1007/s11036-021-01781-xOnline publication date: 27-May-2021
  • (2020)Security Properties of Gait for Mobile Device PairingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2019.289793319:3(697-710)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2020
  • (2019)Track Me & Unlock: Secured Mutual Authentication System of Integrating Phone Unlock & Women’s Safety Application using MEMSIOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering10.1088/1757-899X/590/1/012004590(012004)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2019
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