sesa 18(17): e3

Research Article

BluePass: A Mobile Device Assisted Password Manager

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  • @ARTICLE{10.4108/eai.10-1-2019.156244,
        author={Yue Li and Haining Wang and Kun Sun},
        title={BluePass: A Mobile Device Assisted Password Manager},
        journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety},
        volume={5},
        number={17},
        publisher={EAI},
        journal_a={SESA},
        year={2018},
        month={12},
        keywords={Authentication, Password, Password Manager, Two-factor Authentication},
        doi={10.4108/eai.10-1-2019.156244}
    }
    
  • Yue Li
    Haining Wang
    Kun Sun
    Year: 2018
    BluePass: A Mobile Device Assisted Password Manager
    SESA
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.10-1-2019.156244
Yue Li1,*, Haining Wang2, Kun Sun3
  • 1: Department of Computer Science, College of William&Mary
  • 2: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware
  • 3: Department of Information Sciences and Technology George Mason University
*Contact email: yli@cs.wm.edu

Abstract

With the growing number of online accounts a user possesses, managing passwords has been unprecedentedly challenging. Password managers have emerged to help users managing their passwords. However, state-of-the-art cloud based password managers are vulnerable to data breach and a master password becomes a single point of failure. To address these security vulnerabilities, we propose BluePass, a password manager that stores the password vault (i.e., the set of all the encrypted site passwords of a user) locally in a mobile device and a decryption key to the vault in the user computer. BluePass partially inherits the security characteristics of two-factor authentication by requiring both a mobile device and a master password to retrieve and decrypt the site passwords. BluePass leverages short-range nature of Bluetooth to automatically retrieve site passwords and fill the login fields, providing a hand-free user experience.