Effect on Response Time of the Incorporated WebSocket Persistent Connection Feature in Qr Code Based Authentication

Abstract

The need for secure authentication into systems has led to exploring of alternative secure authentication mechanism. QR code is deemed more secure and has thus increased in popularity, but implementation of QR code has downside of periodic polling; where client devices periodically poll the server to confirm whether the authentication was successful. Periodic polling contributes additional traffic, leading to increased response time, and often resulting to Denial of Service. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of implementing WebSocket feature to provide permanent connection between server and client in QR code authentication environment. Two experiments were setup where the control/reference experiment was used to determine baseline of response time for growing number of clients. It tested response time characteristics where periodic polling was at play. The treatment/ conceptual experiment implemented a persistent authenticated connection via WebSocket to eliminated periodic polling. The study hypothesized that a reduction in response time would be observed, when periodic polling in eliminated. The study applied experimental research design by simulating the control and treatment experiments, with an increasing number of clients in the OMNeT ++ simulator. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to gather and evaluate data, comparing the performance of conceptual and reference models. It was observed that while the treatment/conceptual experiment demonstrated a considerable reduction of more than 80 percent, the response time in the control/reference experiment rose as the number of clients increased. With a standard variation of 22.99 ms, WebSocket persistent connection feature significantly lowered response time in QR code authentication. While the results look promising, the study recommended practical testing of this feature in real-environment to ascertain the model's ability to address the periodic polling challenge that negatively impacts on response times, which often leads to Denial of Service in Quick Response-based authentication.