text: Human errors in performing security-critical tasks are typically blamed on the complexity of those tasks. However, such errors can also occur because of (possibly unexpected) sensory distractions. A sensory distraction that produces negative effects can be abused by the adversary that controls the environment. Meanwhile, a distraction with positive effects can be artificially introduced to improve user performance. The goal of this work is to explore the effects of visual stimuli on the performance of security-critical tasks. To this end, we experimented with a large number of subjects who were exposed to a range of unexpected visual stimuli while attempting to perform Bluetooth Pairing. Our results clearly demonstrate substantially increased task completion times and markedly lower task success rates. These negative effects are noteworthy, especially, when contrasted with prior results on audio distractions which had positive effects on performance of similar tasks. Experiments were conducted in a novel (fully automated and completely unattended) experimental environment. This yielded more uniform experiments, better scalability and significantly lower financial and logistical burdens. We discuss this experience, including benefits and limitations of the unattended automated experiment paradigm.
  @cite_10: Solutions for an easy and secure setup of a wireless connection between two devices are urgently needed for WLAN, Wireless USB, Bluetooth and similar standards for short range wireless communication. All such key exchange protocols employ data authentication as an unavoidable subtask. As a solution, we propose an asymptotically optimal protocol family for data authentication that uses short manually authenticated out-of-band messages. Compared to previous articles by Vaudenay and Pasini the results of this paper are more general and based on weaker security assumptions. In addition to providing security proofs for our protocols, we focus also on implementation details and propose practically secure and efficient sub-primitives for applications.
summary: For example, Short Authenticated String (SAS) protocols ask the user to compare two strings of about 20 bits each @cite_10 .