Facebook Research Award Presented to SECUSO Research Group

Facebook honors Melanie Volkamer, Peter Mayer and Reyhan Düzgün of SECUSO and Sanchari Das, University of Denver, for their research on secure and user-friendly authentication methods in augmented and virtual reality technology.

Technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR & VR) have advanced digital communication and connect people worldwide. AR & VR devices enable various social activities such as virtual gaming or shopping that require authentication in shared spaces. The provision of secure as well as user-friendly authentication methods in AR & VR technology is therefore immensely important. In this area, the SECUSO research group of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology together with the University of Denver won a Facebook Research Award worth 75,000 US dollars.

"On the way to secure and user-friendly authentication for so-called head-mounted displays, we have developed the ZeTA protocol," says Professor Melanie Volkamer, head of the SECUSO research group, which is part of the Institute for Applied Computer Science and Formal Description Methods (AIFB). The ZeTA (Zero-Trust-Authentication) protocol enables secure authentication in shared rooms and can be used with the available interaction methods of head-mounted displays. The research goal is to develop different designs of ZeTA with respect to usability and security and to evaluate them with user studies.

sfo, 27.10.2020