We are proud to announce that Dr. Qiang Zeng has received an NSF Career Award for his project titled "Towards Secure and Usable IoT Authentication Under Constraints".

The project seeks to improve IoT authentication and deliver novel approaches, algorithms, techniques, and systems through the following thrusts. Thrust 1: Authentication for UI-Constrained Devices. A protocol that supports mutual authentication, over an insecure wireless channel, to establish trust between a UI-constrained device and the user to support authentication for heterogeneous IoT devices. Thrust 2: Authentication for Distance-Constrained Devices. A highly usable approach enables secure authentication between an IoT device and the user even when they are multiple meters apart, which has applications ranging from drone delivery to ride sharing. Thrust 3: Authentication for Operation-Constrained Devices. For traditional objects retrofitted with zero-UI sensor nodes, AI-assisted implicit authentication enables recognizing a user without requiring any explicit authentication operations. In sum, the research seeks to substantially advance IoT authentication and foster a variety of IoT applications.