Authentication using multi-level social networks

Abstract

Authentication is an important way to protect security. Many web applications such as mobile banking, emails, online shopping require users to provide their credentials to authenticate themselves before they can use the services. Four factors, including password, token, biometrics, social networks, have been proposed for authentication. However, the proposed authentication schemes of the four factors all suffer from different shortcomings. In this paper, we propose a multi-level social authentication framework. Our analysis shows that the framework is much more robust than the existing approaches. More importantly, we minimize the potential privacy disclosure of users during the authentication procedure. We present our framework, conduct performance analysis and various security attack analysis. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.