Multifactor user authentication systems enhance security by augmenting passwords with the verification of additional pieces of information such as the possession of a particular device. In this work we present an innovative user authentication scheme that verifies the possession of the user’s smartphone by uniquely identifying its camera sensor. High-frequency components of the photo-response nonuniformity of the optical sensor are extracted from raw images and used as a weak physical unclonable function. A novel scheme for efficient transmission and server-side verification is also designed based on adaptive random projections and on an innovative fuzzy extractor using polar codes. The security of the system is thoroughly analyzed under different attack scenarios both theoretically and experimentally.
Tiziano Bianchi (PhD in Computer Engineering and Telecommunications, 2005) is Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino. His research focuses on topics of security and multimedia forensics. He collaborated with Prof. Alessandro Piva, of the Forensic Lab (FORLAB) of the Università degli Studi di Firenze. He has more than 100 scientific articles on international journals and conference proceedings, including a recent contribution in the Handbook of Digital Forensics of Multimedia Data and Devices.