WearRF-CLA: Continuous Location Authentication with Wrist Wearables and UHF RFID

Abstract

Continuous location authentication (CLA) seeks to continuously and automatically verify the physical presence of legitimate users in a protected indoor area. CLA can play an important role in contexts where access to electrical or physical resources must be limited to physically present legitimate users. In this paper, we present WearRF-CLA, a novel CLA scheme built upon increasingly popular wrist wearables and UHF RFID systems. WearRF-CLA explores the observation that human daily routines in a protected indoor area comprise a sequence of human-states (e.g., walking and sitting) that follow predictable state transitions. Each legitimate WearRF-CLA user registers his/her RFID tag and also wrist wearable during system enrollment. After the user enters a protected area, WearRF-CLA continuously collects and processes the gyroscope data of the wrist wearable and the phase data of the RFID tag signals to verify three factors to determine the user's physical presence/absence without explicit user involvement: (1) the tag ID as in a traditional RFID authentication system, (2) the validity of the human-state chain, and (3) the continuous coexistence of the paired wrist wearable and RFID tag with the user. The user passes CLA if and only if all three factors can be validated. Extensive user experiments on commodity smartwatches and UHF RFID devices confirm the very high security and low authentication latency of WearRF-CLA.