Ambient sound can be part of two-factor authentication
For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past few years, two-factor authentication is something that you use to re-verify your credentials to log into a particular site or service. This authentication is typically completed in the form of text message, a phone call, or a notification on your smartphone.
Although 2FA is extremely secure, it is also slightly annoying to have to open up a secondary app to authenticate yourself again. A couple of researchers from Switzerland want to make that process even easier and less annoying. So, the researchers want to get rid of the text-based bits and use ambient sound instead.
What they want to achieve, is authentication with sound. Basically, when you’re trying to log into a service, the website will send a notification to an app on your smartphone. This basically will let the smartphone know that now is the time for authentication.
Once you receive that notification, the app will then record a couple of seconds of sound that it hears around you. Then your laptop will do the same and then they will compare that sound. If both sounds seem similar, and 2FA will be completed.
It is obvious that this process will work better on laptops (and mobile devices) as opposed to desktops, considering that most desktops don’t have a microphone or a webcam hooked up.
As of now, the technology is still in process and the researchers are refining the entire process. We hope that Sound-Proof will not remain a research project for long, but make it into the mainstream before to long.
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