Security by, and for, Converged Mobile Devices

Abstract

Inheriting the vast mobile phone market, converged mobile devices (“smartphones”) are poised to become the first ubiquitous personal computing platform.In this talk we detail our vision of the smartphone as a universal access control device—replacing physical keys, access tokens, etc.—and describe our efforts to address some of the technical challenges that stand in the way of this vision.Our discussion will focus on: techniques to prevent the misuse of a stolen device; novel user interfaces that aid in the secure use of such a device; and the design of an access control framework for the variety of authorization scenarios that such a device must accommodate.We also describe our efforts to deploy this technology in a testbed on the Carnegie Mellon campus.