A novel transparent user authentication approach for mobile applications

ABSTRACT With the rapid growth of smartphones and tablets in our daily lives, securing the sensitive data stored upon them makes authentication of paramount importance. Current authentication approaches do not re-authenticate in order to re-validate the user’s identity after accessing a mobile phone. Accordingly, there is a security benefit if authentication can be applied continually and transparently (i.e., without obstructing the user’s activities) to authenticate legitimate users, which is maintained beyond the point of entry. To this end, this paper suggests a novel transparent user authentication method for mobile applications by applying biometric authentication on each service within a single application in a secure and usable manner based on the risk level. A study involving data collected from 76 users over a one-month period using 12 mobile applications was undertaken to examine the proposed approach. The experimental results show that this approach achieved desirable outcomes for applying a transparent authentication system at an intra-process level, with an average of 6% intrusive authentication requests. Interestingly, when the participants were divided into three levels of usage (high, medium and low), the average intrusive authentication request was 3% which indicates a clear enhancement and suggests that the system would add a further level of security without imposing significant inconvenience upon the user.