Authentication with what you see and remember in the Internet of Things

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm seamlessly integrating a great number of smart objects ubiquitously connected to the Internet. With the rise in interest in the IoT, industry and academia have introduced a variety of authentication technologies to deal with security challenges. Authentication in IoT involves not only shifting intelligent access control down to the end smart objects, but also user identification and verification. In this paper, we build an authentication system based on brainwave reactions to a chain of events. Brainwaves, as external signals of a functioning brain, provide a glimpse into how we think and react. However, seen another way, we could reasonably expect that a given action or event could be linked back to its corresponding brainwave reaction. Recently, commercial products in the form of wearable brainwave headsets have appeared on the market, opening up the possibility of exploiting brainwaves for various purposes and making this more feasible. In the proposed system, we use a commercially available brainwave headset to collect brainwave data from participants for use in the proposed authentication system. After the brainwave data collection process, we apply a machine learning-based approach to extract features from brainwaves to serve as authentication tokens in the system and support the authentication system itself.