One tap owner authentication on smartphones

Mobile devices have become more versatile and thus more tied to the daily life. To protect various pieces of data stored in the device, owner authentication has become essential as the frontline of security. However, with increasing use of these devices, usability is increasingly considered more important in addition to security when designing the system. To meet this demand, touch dynamics authentication has been investigated, but the minimum number of taps required by existing systems is 4. This paper introduces a novel method that needs only a single tap to authenticate the user on his or her smartphone. By using only the internal sensors of smartphones, we achieved an average equal error rate (EER) of 3.8 with 10 owners and 25 unauthorized users.