Towards Improving Usability of Authentication Systems Using Smartphones for Logical and Physical Resource Access in a Single Sign-On Environment

The design of authentication methods raises crucial questions on how to solve conflicts between security and usability goals, that are at opposite ends of a "see-saw". As a matter of fact, the usability of security systems has become a major issue in research on the efficiency and user acceptance of security systems. An authentication is more strong as more tokens are involved in authentication process. The main disadvantage is that users need to purchase and keep with them several tokens and cards. To address the above issues, we propose a two factors authentication scheme that allows users to employ their smartphones as unique authentication token providing access to both online and physical resources in a user-friendly and secure manner.