For on-orbit radiometric calibration of infrared (IR) satellite instruments, we have developed a blackbody source whose temperature can be accurately determined by use of miniature phase change cells to provide fixed points. The temperatures and reproducibility of six phase change cells containing H2O, Ga–Sn alloy, Ga–Zn alloy, phenyl salicylate (PS), succinonitrile, and Ga were accurately determined by the measurement of the phase change plateaux. The points were measured using the quasiadiabatic vacuum measurement system, which was developed by the National Institute of Metrology, China. The reproducibility time span of the Ga fixed point was as long as six years. Results indicated that the reproducibility values of multiple phase-change run-off point temperatures of H2O, Ga–Sn alloy, Ga–Zn alloy, PS, succinonitrile, and Ga were 2.0, 3.6, 1.5, 3.5, 2.9, and 3.1 mK, respectively. Furthermore, a strong linear relation was observed between the heating power and the run-off temperature. With decreasing heating power, the temperature of the plateau decreased and approached the defined fixed-point value. All simulation results of the miniature fixed points were consistent with the experimental data.

The two-factor authentication (2FA) has drawn increasingly attention as the mobile devices become more prevalent. For example, the user's possession of the enrolled phone could be used by the 2FA system as the second proof to protect his/her online accounts. Existing 2FA solutions mainly require some form of user-device interaction, which may severely affect user experience and creates extra burdens to users. In this work, we propose Proximity-Echo, a secure 2FA system utilizing the proximity of a user's enrolled phone and the login device as the second proof without requiring the user's interactions or pre-constructed device fingerprints. The basic idea of Proximity-Echo is to derive location signatures based on acoustic beep signals emitted alternately by both devices and sensing the echoes with microphones, and compare the extracted signatures for proximity detection. Given the received beep signal, our system designs a period selection scheme to identify two sound segments accurately: the chirp period is the sound segment propagating directly from the speaker to the microphone whereas the echo period is the sound segment reflected back by surrounding objects. To achieve an accurate proximity detection, we develop a new energy loss compensation extraction scheme by utilizing the extracted chirp periods to estimate the intrinsic differences of energy loss between microphones of the enrolled phone and the login device. Our proximity detection component then conducts the similarity comparison between the identified two echo periods after the energy loss compensation to effectively determine whether the enrolled phone and the login device are in proximity for 2FA. Our experimental results show that our Proximity-Echo is accurate in providing 2FA and robust to both man-in-the-middle (MiM) and co-located attacks across different scenarios and device models.