Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Moonshine: An Online Randomness Distiller For Zero-Involvement Authentication, Jack West, Kyuin Lee, Suman Banerjee, Younghyun Kim, George K. Thiruvathukal, Neil Klingensmith

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Context-based authentication is a method for transparently validating another device's legitimacy to join a network based on location. Devices can pair with one another by continuously harvesting environmental noise to generate a random key with no user involvement. However, there are gaps in our understanding of the theoretical limitations of environmental noise harvesting, making it difficult for researchers to build efficient algorithms for sampling environmental noise and distilling keys from that noise. This work explores the information-theoretic capacity of context-based authentication mechanisms to generate random bit strings from environmental noise sources with known properties. Using only mild assumptions about the …