Seamless authentication for online teaching and meeting

Abstract

The lockdowns and travel restrictions in the current coronavirus pandemic situation has replaced face-to-face teaching and meeting with the online alternatives. Recently, the video conferencing tool Zoom has become extremely popular for its simple-to-use features and low network bandwidth requirement. However, Zoom has serious security and privacy issues. Due to weak authentication mechanisms, unauthorised persons are invading Zoom sessions and creating disturbances (known as Zoom bombing). In this paper, we propose a preliminary work towards a seamless authentication mechanism for Zoom-based teaching and meeting. Our method is based on PRNU (Photo Response Non-Uniformity)-based camera authentication, which can authenticate the camera of a device used in a Zoom meeting without requiring any assistance from the participants (e.g., needing the participant to provide biometric). Results from a small-scale experiment validate the proposed method.