arXiv · 1207.6231
Touchalytics: On the Applicability of Touchscreen Input as a Behavioral Biometric for Continuous Authentication
Abstract
We investigate whether a classifier can continuously authenticate users based on the way they interact with the touchscreen of a smart phone. We propose a set of 30 behavioral touch features that can be extracted from raw touchscreen logs and demonstrate that different users populate distinct subspaces of this feature space. In a systematic experiment designed to test how this behavioral pattern exhibits consistency over time, we collected touch data from users interacting with a smart phone using basic navigation maneuvers, i.e., up-down and left-right scrolling. We propose a classification framework that learns the touch behavior of a user during an enrollment phase and is able to accept or reject the current user by monitoring interaction with the touch screen. The classifier achieves a median equal error rate of 0% for intra-session authentication, 2%-3% for inter-session authentication and below 4% when the authentication test was carried out one week after the enrollment phase. While our experimental findings disqualify this method as a standalone authentication mechanism for long-term authentication, it could be implemented as a means to extend screen-lock time or as a part of a multi-modal biometric authentication system.
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Mario Frank, Ralf Biedert, Eugene Ma, Ivan Martinovic, Dawn Song. 2012-10-08. Touchalytics: On the Applicability of Touchscreen Input as a Behavioral Biometric for Continuous Authentication. https://doi.org/10.1109/tifs.2012.2225048
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