Abstract
Most visual code authentication schemes in the literature have been shown to be vulnerable to relay attacks: the attacker logs into the victim’s “account A” using credentials that the victim provides with the intent of logging into “account B”. Visual codes are not human-readable and therefore the victim cannot distinguish between the codes for A and B; on the other hand, codes must be machine-readable in order to automate the login process. We introduce a new type of visual code, the SAVVIcode, that contains an integrity-validated human-readable bitmap. With SAVVIcode, attackers have a harder time swapping visual codes surreptitiously because the integrity check prevents them from modifying or hiding the human-readable distinguisher.
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Notes
- 1.
Another mechanism used to improve the scanning accuracy of visual codes is to use encodings that break up large contiguous blocks of the same colour. The SAVVIcode does not use this method for resynchronisation because we want the bitmap to be immediately readable, even without meaning to, by the person scanning the code. We thus want a high-contrast bitmap in which the black ink stands out against a background of white space.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Pico team for their feedback and to Andy Rice for helpful discussions on visual code scanning technology.
The Pico team is also working on an alternative “augmented reality” approach in which the human-readable tag is displayed by the scanner rather than being shown alongside the visual tag.
The second author is partly supported by European Research Council grant 307224 (Pico).
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Millican, J., Stajano, F. (2015). SAVVIcode: Preventing Mafia Attacks on Visual Code Authentication Schemes (Short Paper). In: Mjølsnes, S. (eds) Technology and Practice of Passwords. PASSWORDS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24192-0_10
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