OpenUAT Home

This is the homepage of OpenUAT, The Open Source Ubiquitous Authentication Toolkit. It provides combinations of cryptographic primitives and techniques with methods from sensor data analysis to create new authentication methods for ubiquitous computing.

Context-based authentication

Context authentication, sometimes also called context-based authentication, means that users and/or devices are authenticated based on context. It is a young and still small, but active research area and currently my main research interest. The term context, as used in pervasive/ubiquitious computing research, describes the situation or environment in which some action takes place.
Context authentication verifies that a user and a device or multiple devices share a common part of their context, e.g. that they are at the same location, that they are carried by the same user, or that the experience the same audio scene. Sharing context in this sense can be used for efficient and intuitive authentication protocols, from explicit authentication (where the user explicitly needs to perform some interaction to authenticate) to implicit authentication (where just being in a certain context entails authentication). There exist few projects that use a very specific aspect of context for authentication, but most of them still use it explicitly.