Signature Verification Using Critical Segments for Securing Mobile Transactions

The explosive usage of mobile devices enables conducting electronic transactions involving direct signature on such devices. Thus, user signature verification becomes critical to ensure the success deployment of online transactions such as approving legal documents and authenticating financial transactions. Existing approaches mainly focus on user verification targeting the unlocking of mobile devices or performing continuous verification based on a user's behavioral traits. Few studies provide efficient real-time user signature verification. In this work, we propose a critical segment based online signature verification system to secure mobile transactions on multi-touch mobile devices. Our system identifies and exploits the segments which remain invariant within a user's signature to capture the intrinsic signing behavior embedded in each user's signature. Our system extracts useful features from a user's signature that describe both the geometric layout of the signature as well as behavioral and physiological characteristics in the user's signing process. Given the input signatures for user enrollment, our system further designs a quality score to identify the problematic signature sets to achieve robust user signature profile construction. Moreover, we develop the signature normalization and interpolation methods to achieve robust signature verification in the presence of signature geometric distortions caused by different writing sizes, orientations and locations on touch screens. Our experimental evaluation of 25 subjects over six months time period shows that our system is highly accurate in provide signature verification and robust to signature forging attacks.