Authentication of Smartphone Users Based on Activity Recognition and Mobile Sensing

• Main Authors: Muhammad Ehatisham-ul-Haq, Muhammad Awais Azam, Jonathan Loo, Kai Shuang, Syed Islam, Usman Naeem, Yasar Amin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2017-09-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: activity recognition; behavioral biometrics; continuous sensing; micro-environment sensing; mobile sensing; smartphone authentication; ubiquitous computing
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/9/2043

Smartphones are context-aware devices that provide a compelling platform for ubiquitous computing and assist users in accomplishing many of their routine tasks anytime and anywhere, such as sending and receiving emails. The nature of tasks conducted with these devices has evolved with the exponential increase in the sensing and computing capabilities of a smartphone. Due to the ease of use and convenience, many users tend to store their private data, such as personal identifiers and bank account details, on their smartphone. However, this sensitive data can be vulnerable if the device gets stolen or lost. A traditional approach for protecting this type of data on mobile devices is to authenticate users with mechanisms such as PINs, passwords, and fingerprint recognition. However, these techniques are vulnerable to user compliance and a plethora of attacks, such as smudge attacks. The work in this paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel authentication framework, which is based on recognizing the behavioral traits of smartphone users using the embedded sensors of smartphone, such as Accelerometer, Gyroscope and Magnetometer. The proposed framework also provides a platform for carrying out multi-class smart user authentication, which provides different levels of access to a wide range of smartphone users. This work has been validated with a series of experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.