Researchers from Dartmouth College recently discovered a new method to secure user information systems.

Researchers from the college's Trustworthy Health and Wellness group unveiled their discovery at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on Security.

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The new approach, called Zero-Effort Bilateral Recurring Authentication or ZEBRA for short, authenticates users "continuously" while they use a computer terminal.

It then automatically logs them out when they are done using it, whether they logged out or not.

The current methods uses one-time authentication only, where users themselves must log out from the terminal. But they sometimes forget, which is a security risk.

Shrirang Mare, a Ph.D. computer science student from Dartmouth College, addressed this security problem by developing the new approach.

A user wears a bracelet on his or her wrist when interacting with a terminal. The bracelet records the user's wrist movement and sends it to the terminal.

The terminal later compares the wrist movement with the information it receives from the user and verifies his or her presence, if it finds a match.

The bracelet uses a built-in accelerometer, a gyroscope and radio.

The new research is a big step for securing user information systems and records, like those found in hospitals.

"In this work, we focused on the deauthentication problem for desktop computers because we were motivated by associated problems faced by healthcare professionals in hospitals," said Professor David Kotz, senior author of the current study.

"It would be natural to extend ZEBRA to mobile devices such as smartphones or tablet computers, and we believe this is possible despite some different challenges."

TagsBracelet, Dartmouth College