Middle Man: An Efficient Two-Factor Authentication Framework

Two-factor authentication (TFA) is increasingly becoming a go-to for user security and identification. With an increase in cyber crimes each year more and more businesses (ranging from financial institutions to retail) are implementing TFA mechanisms as a way to ensure user credibility within their systems which in turn decreases the risk of any malicious users infiltrating their systems. In this invited paper, we describe a lightweight two-factor authentication system where legitimate users are using their mobile devices in order to get access to certain services. In addition to that, our service can be used as a single-sign-on framework since our system allows many different services to connect to our platform and give the option to their users to connect to their services via our TFA framework. To achieve that, we have built an Application Programming Interface (API) that can receive requests from authorised (i.e. registered) businesses. Finally, users are able to login to a server by using an iOS app, that we have developed, to receive a dynamic one-time-password (OTP). The OTP generated in a dynamic and random way with high entropy and it is valid only for a short period of time.