This post is part of our research archive and is a selected publication. Although Armatyr was founded in 2026, members of our team have been conducting and publishing research in medical device and hospital IT security for over a decade. We maintain this archive to provide context for our experience and contributions to the field.

The authors introduce a wearable bracelet that uses the Kerberos protocol to give hospital staff fast, secure authentication to shared workstations without repeatedly re-entering credentials. After a single login, the bracelet stores an authentication ticket and transmits it to nearby devices using the wearer’s body as the communication medium, so staff can move between shared terminals without stopping to retype a password each time. The goal is to reduce the friction that pushes clinicians toward risky password shortcuts in time-sensitive care settings. Their full abstract is quoted below:

The most common method for a user to gain access to a system, service, or resource is to provide a secret, often a password, that verifies her identity and thus authenticates her. Password-based authentication is considered strong only when the password meets certain length and complexity requirements, or when it is combined with other methods in multi-factor authentication. Unfortunately, many authentication systems do not enforce strong passwords due to a number of limitations; for example, the time taken to enter complex passwords. We present an authentication system that addresses these limitations by prompting a user for credentials once and then storing an authentication ticket in a wearable device that we call Kerberos Bracelet Identification (KBID).

Joseph Carrigan, Paul Martin, and Michael Rushanan. “KBID: Kerberos Bracelet Identification.” Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2016.