This project deals with mobile device to user authentication with vibration patterns. The idea of device to user authentication is that devices authenticate to their users before or while they are used (similar to users authenticating to their devices before using them by entering a PIN, password, or similar, which is done frequently on mobile devices nowadays). Using device to user authentication, hardware phishing attacks could be detected and/or prevented. With hardware phishing attacks, users are being deceived to take identical looking, but malicious devices as their devices, then reveal secret information to these malicious devices, which consequently is obtained by attackers. In this regard, mobile device vibrations provide a way of unobtrusively communicating hard-to-eavesdrop information from mobile devices to their users.

For further details see http://usmile.at/ and the corresponding publication: 
 
Rainhard Dieter Findling and Rene Mayrhofer: Towards Device-to-User Authentication: Protecting Against Phishing Hardware by Ensuring Mobile Device Authenticity using Vibration Patterns. Proc. MUM'15: 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, ACM, 2015