Implicit Smartphone User Authentication with Sensors and Contextual Machine Learning
Wei-Han Lee, Ruby B. Lee
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Published on the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.03523
Authentication of smartphone users is important because a lot of sensitive data is stored in the smartphone and the smartphone is also used to access various cloud data and services. However, smartphones are easily stolen or co-opted by an attacker. Beyond the initial login, it is highly desirable to re-authenticate end-users who are continuing to access security-critical services and data. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication system for implicit, continuous authentication of the smartphone user based on behavioral characteristics, by leveraging the sensors already ubiquitously built into smartphones. We propose novel context-based authentication models to differentiate the legitimate smartphone owner versus other users. We systematically show how to achieve high authentication accuracy with different design alternatives in sensor and feature selection, machine learning techniques, context detection and multiple devices. Our system can achieve excellent authentication performance with 98.1% accuracy with negligible system overhead and less than 2.4% battery consumption.
Smartphones are now frequently used by end-users as the portals to cloud-based services, and smartphones are easily stolen or co-opted by an attacker. Beyond the initial log-in mechanism, it is highly desirable to re-authenticate end-users who are continuing to access security-critical services and data, whether in the cloud or in the smartphone. But attackers who have gained access to a logged-in smartphone have no incentive to re-authenticate, so this must be done in an automatic, non-bypassable way. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication system, iAuth, for implicit, continuous au…
Recent research has shown the possibility of using smartphones' sensors and accessories to extract some behavioral attributes such as touch dynamics, keystroke dynamics and gait recognition. These attributes are known as behavioral biometrics and could be used to verify or identify users implicitly and continuously on smartphones. The authentication systems that have been built based on these behavioral biometric traits are known as active or continuous authentication systems. This paper provides a review of the active authentication systems. We present the components and the operating process…
In this paper we list the sensors commonly available in modern smartphones and provide a general outlook of the different ways these sensors can be used for modeling the interaction between human and smartphones. We then provide a taxonomy of applications that can exploit the signals originated by these sensors in three different dimensions, depending on the main information content embedded in the signals exploited in the application: neuromotor skills, cognitive functions, and behaviors/routines. We then summarize a representative selection of existing research datasets in this area, with sp…
The widespread use of smartphones gives rise to new security and privacy concerns. Smartphone thefts account for the largest percentage of thefts in recent crime statistics. Using a victim's smartphone, the attacker can launch impersonation attacks, which threaten the security of the victim and other users in the network. Our threat model includes the attacker taking over the phone after the user has logged on with his password or pin. Our goal is to design a mechanism for smartphones to better authenticate the current user, continuously and implicitly, and raise alerts when necessary. In this…
We propose Secure Pick Up (SPU), a convenient, lightweight, in-device, non-intrusive and automatic-learning system for smartphone user authentication. Operating in the background, our system implicitly observes users' phone pick-up movements, the way they bend their arms when they pick up a smartphone to interact with the device, to authenticate the users. Our SPU outperforms the state-of-the-art implicit authentication mechanisms in three main aspects: 1) SPU automatically learns the user's behavioral pattern without requiring a large amount of training data (especially those of other users) …
Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Smartphones, in particular, have become more than personal assistants. These devices have provided new avenues for consumers to play, work, and socialize whenever and wherever they want. Smartphones are small in size, so they are easy to handle and to stow and carry in users' pockets or purses. However, mobile devices are also susceptible to various problems. One of the greatest concerns is the possibility of breach in security and privacy if the device is seized by an outside party. It is possible that threats can come from fr…
We introduce Hand Movement, Orientation, and Grasp (HMOG), a set of behavioral features to continuously authenticate smartphone users. HMOG features unobtrusively capture subtle micro-movement and orientation dynamics resulting from how a user grasps, holds, and taps on the smartphone. We evaluated authentication and biometric key generation (BKG) performance of HMOG features on data collected from 100 subjects typing on a virtual keyboard. Data was collected under two conditions: sitting and walking. We achieved authentication EERs as low as 7.16% (walking) and 10.05% (sitting) when we combin…
Graduate School of Science and Engineering of Kansai University(关西大学理工学部);Osaka Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology(大阪工业科学技术研究所);Faculty of Engineering Science of Kansai University(关西大学工程科学部)
In recent years, biometric authentication technology for smartphones has become widespread, with the mainstream methods being fingerprint authentication and face recognition. However, fingerprint authentication cannot be used when hands are wet, and face recognition cannot be used when a person is wearing a mask. Therefore, we examine a personal authentication system using the pinna as a new approach for biometric authentication on smartphones. Authentication systems based on the acoustic transfer function of the pinna (PRTF: Pinna Related Transfer Function) have been investigated. However, th…
As people store more personal data in their smartphones, the consequences of having it stolen or lost become an increasing concern. A typical counter-measure to avoid this risk is to set up a secret code that has to be entered to unlock the device after a period of inactivity. However, for blind users, PINs and passwords are inadequate, since entry 1) consumes a non-trivial amount of time, e.g. using screen readers, 2) is susceptible to observation, where nearby people can see or hear the secret code, and 3) might collide with social norms, e.g. disrupting personal interactions. Tap-based auth…
University of Central Florida(中佛罗里达大学);Ewha Womans University(梨花女子大学)
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University of Maryland, College Park(马里兰大学帕克分校);University of Oulu(奥卢大学)
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We study the feasibility of touch gesture behavioural biometrics for implicit authentication of users on a smartglass (Google Glass) by proposing a continuous authentication system using two classifiers: SVM with RBF kernel, and a new classifier based on Chebyshev's concentration inequality. Based on data collected from 30 volunteers, we show that such authentication is feasible both in terms of classification accuracy and computational load on smartglasses. We achieve a classification accuracy of up to 99% with only 75 training samples using behavioural biometric data from four different type…
In order to protect user privacy on mobile devices, an event-driven implicit authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. Several methods of utilizing the scheme for recognizing legitimate user behavior are investigated. The investigated methods compute an aggregate score and a threshold in real-time to determine the trust level of the current user using real data derived from user interaction with the device. The proposed scheme is designed to: operate completely in the background, require minimal training period, enable high user recognition rate for implicit authentication, and prompt d…
Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too frequently and in benign situations, they may become habituated and approve all future requests without regard for the consequences. If they are asked to make too few security decisions, they may become concerned that the platform is revealing too much sensitive information. To explore this tradeoff, we instrumented the Android platform to collect data regar…
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In this work, we examine the impact of Treadmill Assisted Gait Spoofing (TAGS) on Wearable Sensor-based Gait Authentication (WSGait). We consider more realistic implementation and deployment scenarios than the previous study, which focused only on the accelerometer sensor and a fixed set of features. Specifically, we consider the situations in which the implementation of WSGait could be using one or more sensors embedded into modern smartphones. Besides, it could be using different sets of features or different classification algorithms, or both. Despite the use of a variety of sensors, featur…
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