Towards the era of wireless keys: How the IoT can change authentication paradigm

In this paper, a new paradigm of user authentication called “wireless key” is described. Following this concept, a novel many-to-many authentication scheme based on passive NFC tags is proposed. In contradiction to existing solutions that assume a wireless key to be a battery-powered device with considerable computational power, we suggest to use a passive NFC tag in order to minimise the key size and significantly reduce the costs. The security of all the information on the tag is guaranteed by a specific data encryption scheme constructed on top of strong cryptographic primitives. In our approach, all the computations are performed by the service user is authenticating in, and thus no computational power and no battery on the key side is needed. This comes to an user-friendly, secure and cost-efficient solution. Moreover, the system core - proposed encryption scheme - could be easily applied to any other carrier technologies, as, for example, to Bluetooth Low Energy or Wireless USB. Having generalised our solution to hold an integrity property, it can also be used for another emerging application - secure documents storage.