A Tale of Location-Based User Authentication

The attitude towards passwords has drastically changed over the past years. Although they protected workstations from illicit access for decades, with today’s increased computational power, simple passwords became easy targets for attacks, whereas complex passwords are difficult to remember for the users. It appears as if the classical password protection has become obsolete and has to give way to similarly secured schemes, which are seamless for users. Novel methodologies may be sound and secure from a technical point of view, their success will be challenged by the simple question whether a user feels secure or not. In this work, we propose a proximity based login and session locking scheme, based on bluetooth beacons. We describe the big data architecture required to implement secured location-based services in smart buildings. To round our contribution out, we describe a medium scale user study with 40 participants, conducted to answer the question: Do users feel secure?