PEAR

Abstract

As users have to manage an increasing number of accounts, they have to balance password security and password usability. As such, many users use insecure passwords resulting in their accounts and data being vulnerable to unauthorized accesses. In this paper, we present Physically Enhanced Authentication Ring, or PEAR, a system that alleviates this problem. We leverage Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) to create unclonable hardware devices, which users use to authenticate. Using a hardware device, our system uses zero-knowledge proofs, which provide better security than traditional passwords, yet users must only enter a simple PIN. As such, our system is very usable and imposes little to no burden on end users and service providers. We present transaction levels on top of PEAR of as an extension and then discuss some other work that could be done in the future.