Two-factor authentication is the way to secure your online accounts these days. With two-factor authentication, you can basically prevent hackers from accessing your accounts by following a 2 step authentication before you log in. You first enter your password, and will then be prompted to enter another “one time code” which is generated on the spot and sent to your mobile device.
But apparently, for some people, two-factor authentication can be bit too slow and time consuming when you always need to unlock your device and wait to receive the code, to then type it in.
So now, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have come up with a new, faster way to authenticate your logins and it’s called “Sound-Proof” .
What is sound-proof? The new mechanism will rely on ambient sounds around you when when you try to login. Both your phone and computer will start to listen for ambient sounds, and when its determined that both devices are actually listening to the same thing, at the same location, your login will be successful.
In Sound-Proof the second authentication factor is the proximity of the user’s phone to the device being used to log in. The proximity of the two devices is verified by comparing the ambient noise recorded by their microphones. Audio recording and comparison are transparent to the user, so that the user experience is similar to the one of password-only authentication.
For security and privacy purposes, the system will upload and verify digital signatures of sounds, as opposed to actual recordings of your surroundings.
For now, Sound-Proof is just a research project, but the team hopes to turn it into reality in the future.
