You are how you touch: User verification on smartphones via tapping behaviors

Abstract

Smartphone users have their own unique behavioral patterns when tapping on the touch screens. These personal patterns are reflected on the different rhythm, strength, and angle preferences of the applied force. Since smart phones are equipped with various sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, and touch screen sensors, capturing a user's tapping behaviors can be done seamlessly. Exploiting the combination of four features (acceleration, pressure, size, and time) extracted from smart phone sensors, we propose a non-intrusive user verification mechanism to substantiate whether an authenticating user is the true owner of the smart phone or an impostor who happens to know the pass code. Based on the tapping data collected from over 80 users, we conduct a series of experiments to validate the efficacy of our proposed system. Our experimental results show that our verification system achieves high accuracy with averaged equal error rates of down to 3.65%. As our verification system can be seamlessly integrated with the existing user authentication mechanisms on smart phones, its deployment and usage are transparent to users and do not require any extra hardware support.