Glass Unlock: Enhancing Security of Smartphone Unlocking through Leveraging a Private Near-eye Display

This paper presents Glass Unlock, a novel concept using smart glasses for smartphone unlocking, which is theoretically secure against smudge attacks, shoulder-surfing, and camera attacks. By introducing an additional temporary secret like the layout of digits that is only shown on the private near-eye display, attackers cannot make sense of the observed input on the almost empty phone screen. We report a user study with three alternative input methods and compare them to current state-of-the-art systems. Our findings show that Glass Unlock only moderately increases authentication times and that users favor the input method yielding the slowest input times as it avoids focus switches between displays.

Project Video

Publications

Christian Winkler, Jan Gugenheimer, Alexander De Luca, Gabriel Haas, Philipp Speidel, David Dobbelstein, and Enrico Rukzio. 2015. Glass Unlock: Enhancing Security of Smartphone Unlocking through Leveraging a Private Near-eye Display. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1407-1410. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702316