Sensing Your Touch: Strengthen User Authentication via Touch Dynamic Biometrics

Mobile devices are increasingly used to store private and sensitive data, and this has led to an increased demand for more secure and usable authentication services. Currently, mobile device authentication services mainly use a knowledge-based method, e.g. a PIN-based authentication method, and, in some cases, a fingerprint-based authentication method is also supported. The knowledge-based method is vulnerable to impersonation attacks, while the fingerprint-based method can be unreliable sometimes. To make the authentication service more secure and reliable for mobile device users, this paper describes our efforts in investigating the benefits of integrating a touch dynamics authentication method into a PIN-based authentication method. It describes the design, implementation and evaluation of this method. Experimental results show that this approach can significantly reduce the success rate of impersonation attempts; in the case of a 4-digit PIN, the success rate is reduced from 100% (if only the PIN is used) to 9.9% (if both the PIN and the touch dynamics are used).