Continuous Mobile User Authentication Using Combined Biometric Traits

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 11; no. 24; p. 11756
• Main Authors: Reichinger, Dominik, Sonnleitner, Erik, Kurz, Marc
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2021
• Subjects: authentication; Biometrics; Cellular telephones; continuous authentication; hidden markov model; mobile authentication; Passwords; Security management; Smartphones; Usability
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/app112411756

Current state of the art authentication systems for mobile devices primarily rely on single point of entry authentication which imposes several flaws. For example, an attacker obtaining an unlocked device can potentially use and exploit it until the screen gets locked again. With continuous mobile user authentication, a system is embedded into the mobile devices, which continuously monitors biometric features of the person using the device, to validate if those monitored inputs match and therefore were made by the previously authenticated user. We start by giving an introduction towards the state of the art of currently used authentication systems and address related problems. For our main contribution we then propose, implement and discuss a continuous user authentication system for the Android ecosystem, which continuously monitors and records touch, accelerometer and timestamp data, and run experiments to gather data from multiple subjects. After feature extraction and normalization, a Hidden Markov Model is employed using an unsupervised learning approach as classifier and integrated into the Android application for further system evaluation and experimentation. The final model achieves an Area Under Curve of up to 100% while maintaining an Equal Error Rate of 1.34%. This is done by combining position and accelerometer data using gestures with at least 50 data points and averaging the prediction result of 25 consecutive gestures.