Unconscious mind: Authenticating with something you don't know? Or just an infallible liveness test?

Biometrics has become a major field of study in the area of computer security. Liveness tests complement biometric systems by introducing an extra level of authentication to prevent identity forgeries. In this abstract we present the fundamental ideas behind a new authentication paradigm that captures the individual's unique signature by measuring unconsciously motivated mistakes or actions. The robustness of our system relies on the hypothesis that each individual possesses behavioural characteristics that are brought about by some unique traits (i.e. how information is processed, categorized and accessed) that are not consciously accessible to the individual and can be measured as that individual's unique behavioural signature. We will refer to this unconsciously motivated behavioural signature as the unconsciousness signature. An implicit result includes the use of our proposed system as a liveness detection mechanism. Here we describe our hypotheses and provide a rationale that indicates their suitability for further studies as a new authentication paradigm.