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PhD Dissertation Defense - Abhijit Nag

AN ADAPTIVE APPROACH TOWARDS THE SELECTION OF AUTHENTICATION FACTORS IN MULTI-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION (MFA) SYSTEM

Abhijit Nag, PhD Candidate

Monday, October 24, 2016, 9:15 am
FIT 324

Committee Members:
Prof. Dipankar Dasgupta, Advisor
Prof. Lan Wang
Prof. Vasile Rus
Prof. Zhuo Lu

Abstract:

Authentication is considered as a critical safeguard against all types of illegal access to any computing device. Due to recent emerging security threats and compromises of password based authentication services, authentication through single factor is no more reliable to protect user identities. Again, if the single factor is compromised or breached, users cannot access the service until the system is repaired. Hence, to facilitate a stronger protection of computing devices and other critical online services, multi-factor authentication (MFA) comes with a viable option to the users. MFA is a secure process of authentication which requires more than one method of authentication technique chosen from independent categories of credentials. Many authentication mechanisms with varying degree of accuracy and portability are available that support different types of computing devices and platforms. Keeping this in mind, this research is focused on design and implementing an MFA framework to authenticate users efficiently through a subset of available authentication factors (authentication modalities along with their features) in a time-varying operating environment (device, medium and surrounding conditions). This MFA solution selects the authentication factors adaptively sensing the operating environment and provides a better set of authentication factors to the users to verify their claimed identities.