A Novel Software System Protection Scheme Based on Behavior and Context Monitoring

Motivation

News stories about security and data breaches of software systems have become commonplace. Yet companies and individuals continue to store an increasing amount of critical information on particularly vulnerable systems, such as web services. Therefore, restricting access to software systems is more important than ever. However, many of these systems are accessible from anywhere in the world and are protected with only a password.

But passwords are becoming more vulnerable as the Internet grows and attacking schemes such as phishing scams and keyloggers become more prevalent. Even the most secure password-based system can be easily hacked if a malicious individual obtains the login information of a legitimate user, or physically accesses an unattended device with an active user session. Therefore, the authors are motivated to seek innovative user authentication schemes for software systems that can provide security beyond passwords, especially for those vulnerable cloud systems. Furthermore, these schemes should be as generic as possible in order to be applicable to a wide range of systems.