Revisiting Context-Based Authentication in IoT

The emergence of IoT poses new challenges towards solutions for authenticating numerous very heterogeneous IoT devices to their respective trust domains. Using passwords or pre-defined keys have drawbacks that limit their use in IoT scenarios. Recent works propose to use contextual information about ambient physical properties of devices' surroundings as a shared secret to mutually authenticate devices that are co-located, e.g., the same room. In this paper, we analyze these context-based authentication solutions with regard to their security and requirements on context quality. We quantify their achievable security based on empirical real-world data from context measurements in typical IoT environments.