New bracelet designed to bolster health IT security

Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a bracelet that authenticates users continuously while they are using a terminal—and automatically logs them out after they leave the computer.

Dartmouth's Trustworthy Health and Wellness (THaW) researchers say this provides more security than one-time authentication tools like passwords or fingerprints as it avoids security risks that occur when a user fails to log out.

The Zero-Effort Bilateral Recurring Authentication, or ZEBRA, bracelet, worn on a dominant wrist, contains a built-in accelerometer, gyroscope and radio. The bracelet records wrist movement during computer use, and processes it and sends it to the terminal. The terminal compares the wrist movement with the inputs it receives from the user via keyboard and mouse and confirms the continued presence of the user only if they correlate, according to Dartmouth College.

ZEBRA performed with 85 percent accuracy in verifying users and identified all adversaries within 11 seconds.

“This kind of quick reaction can prevent mistakes—such as clinical staff accidentally entering information into the wrong patient's medical record—or inappropriate behavior, such as a bystander examining personal medical information or financial data by taking advantage of a computer left open by an authorized user,” according to the college.

"In this work, we focused on the deauthentication problem for desktop computers because we were motivated by associated problems faced by healthcare professionals in hospitals," said David Kotz, Champion International professor within the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. "It would be natural to extend ZEBRA to mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablet computers, and we believe this is possible despite some different challenges."