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.

User Study

User Study comparing three input methods used with Glass Unlock compared to a baseline that used the phone alone. The results are that users find focus switches between phone and virtual display annoying and therefore prefer the eyes-free swipe input although it yielded the highest input times and error rate in the user study.

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