A Human-Verifiable Authentication Protocol Using Visible Laser Light

Securing wireless channels necessitates authenticating communication partners. For spontaneous interaction, authentication must be efficient and intuitive. One approach to create interaction and authentication methods that scale to using hundreds of services throughout the day is to rely on personal, trusted, mobile devices to interact with the environment. Authenticating the resulting device-to-device interactions requires an out-of-band channel that is verifiable by the user. We present a protocol for creating such an out-of-band channel with visible laser light that is secure against man-in-the-middle attacks even when the laser transmission is not confidential. A prototype implementation shows that an appropriate laser channel can be constructed with simple off-the-shelf components.