This work investigates how context should be taken into account when performing continuous authentication of a smartphone user based on touchscreen and accelerometer readings extracted from swipe gestures. The study is conducted on the publicly available HMOG dataset consisting of 100 study subjects performing pre-defined reading and navigation tasks while sitting and walking. It is shown that context-specific models are needed for different smartphone usage and human activity scenarios to minimize authentication error. Also, the experimental results suggests that utilization of phone movement improves swipe gesture-based verification performance only when the user is moving.
We studied the fusion of three biometric authentication modalities, namely, swiping gestures, typing patterns and the phone movement patterns observed during typing or swiping. A web browser was customized to collect the data generated from the aforementioned modalities over four to seven days in an unconstrained environment. Several features were extracted by using sliding window mechanism for each modality and analyzed by using information gain, correlation, and symmetric uncertainty. Finally, five features from windows of continuous swipes, thirty features from windows of continuously typed letters, and nine features from corresponding phone movement patterns while swiping typing were used to build the authentication system. We evaluated the performance of each modality and their fusion over a dataset of 28 users. The feature-level fusion of swiping and the corresponding phone movement patterns achieved an authentication accuracy of 93.33 , whereas, the score-level fusion of typing behaviors and the corresponding phone movement patterns achieved an authentication accuracy of 89.31 . Recent developments in sensing and communication technologies have led to an explosion in the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. With the increase in the use of mobile devices, users must constantly worry about security and privacy, as the loss of a mobile device could compromise personal information. To deal with this problem, continuous authentication systems (also known as active authentication systems) have been proposed, in which users are continuously monitored after initial access to the mobile device. In this article, we provide an overview of different continuous authentication methods on mobile devices. We discuss the merits and drawbacks of the available approaches and identify promising avenues of research in this rapidly evolving field.