TECHNICAL FIELD

This relates generally to the field of biometric identification, and more specifically to biometric identity extraction for authentication.

BACKGROUND

An exponential growth of smart devices gives rise to security and privacy concerns. It is necessary to authenticate a user's identity in order to prevent appropriation of private information from the smart devices. In recent years, authentication mechanisms using biometric data have shown the potential of providing enhanced authentication over traditional password (“what you know”) and token (“what you have”) authentication approaches.

Biometric characteristics have many desirable traits, such as unique to each individual (“what you are”), non-transferable to others, impossible to forget or lose, difficult to reproduce, and difficult to change or hide. Thus, many have developed biometric identity and authentication (IDA) systems that use biometric data for authentication. However, many existing biometric IDA systems focus on point-of-entry authentication (e.g., fingerprint, iris scan, etc.). The point-of-entry authentication technique has a number of weaknesses. For example, once the user identity, including a forged identity (e.g., by providing a fingerprint image), has been verified at login, the user often gains unfettered access to the smart device. To increase the level of authentication beyond the standard point-of-entry authentication technique, some have proposed continuous biometric authentication. To this end, research suggests that no single biometric approach is ideally suited to all scenarios, e.g., the ability to be compromised, ease of use, obtrusiveness, and/or the embodiment complexity, etc.

