Security Through Entertainment: Experiences Using a Memory Game for Secure Device Pairing

The secure “pairing” of wireless devices based on auxiliary or out-of-band (OOB) communication, such as audio, visual, or tactile channels, is a well-established research direction. However, prior work shows that this approach to pairing can be prone to human errors of different forms that may directly or indirectly translate into man-in-the-middle attacks. To address this problem, we propose a general direction of the use of computer games for pairing. Since games are a popular means of entertainment, our hypothesis is that they may serve as an incentive to users and make the pairing process enjoyable for them, thus improving the usability, as well as the security, of the pairing process. We consider an emerging use case of pairing whereby two different users are involved, each in possession of his or her own device (e.g., Alice and Bob pairing their smartphones for social interactions). We develop “Alice Says,” a pairing game based on a popular memory game called Simon (Says), and discuss the underlying design challenges. We also present a preliminary evaluation of Alice Says via a usability study and demonstrate its feasibility in terms of usability and security. Our results indicate that overall Alice Says was deemed as a fun and an enjoyable way to pair devices, confirming our hypothesis. However, contrary to our intuition, the relatively slower speed of Alice Says pairing was found to be a cause of concern and prompts the need for the design of faster pairing games. We put forth several ways in which this issue can be ameliorated. In addition, we also discuss several other security problems which are lacking optimal solutions and suggest ideas on how entertainment can be used to improve the current state of the art solutions that have been developed to address them.