Research

Two-Factor Authentication for the Bitcoin Protocol

Year 2015
Author Christopher Mann, Daniel Loebenberger
Publisher Security and Trust Management Volume 9331 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 155-171
Link View Research Paper
Categories

Bitcoin / Cryptocurrencies / Security / Technical

We show how to realize two-factor authentication for a Bitcoin wallet. To do so, we explain how to employ an ECDSA adaption of the two-party signature protocol by MacKenzie and Reiter (2004) in the context of Bitcoin and present a prototypic implementation of a Bitcoin wallet that offers both: two-factor authentication and verification over a separate channel. Since we use a smart phone as the second authentication factor, our solution can be used with hardware already available to most users and the user experience is quite similar to the existing online banking authentication methods.