Using a Smart Phone to Strengthen Password-Based Authentication

The authentication based on user´s username and password is one of the most popular ways to verify a user when he or she enters an information system. Thus, in recent years, many attackers, e.g. phishers, aim to steal passwords to intrude information systems. To strengthen the password-based authentication, we introduce a method, named SmartID, where we use a Bluetooth-enabled Smart Phone as a platform to store user´s username, password and their relevant information of login interface. SmartID can help a user authenticate both his or her identify and validity of login interfaces of web sites and desktops. The experiment and analysis show that SmartID can offer an excellent recall rate, and an acceptable precision rate for anti-phishing and anti-pharming. Thus, SmartID is applicable to strengthen password-based authentication.