Authentication in Constrained Settings

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Communication technologies have revolutionized modern society. They have changed the way we do business, travel, manage our personal lives and communicate with our friends. In many cases, this crucially depends on accurate and reliable authentication. We need to get authenticated in order to get access to restricted services and/or places (i.e. transport systems, e-banking, border control). This authentication is performed in constrained settings due to: (i) privacy issues, (ii) noisy conditions, (iii) resource constraints. Privacy-preservation is essential for the protection of sensitive information (i.e. diseases, location, nationality). Noisy conditions refer to physical noise in the communication channel that may lead to modification of the transmitted information, or natural variability due to the authentication medium (e.g. fingerprint scans). Resource constraints refer to limited device power/abilities (i.e. sensors, RFID tags). It is a very challenging problem to develop privacy-preserving authentication for noisy and constrained environments that optimally balance authentication accuracy, privacypreservation and resource consumption. In this paper, we describe the main challenges of the problem of authentication in constrained settings, the current state-of-the-art of the field and possible directions of research.