MagPrint: Deep Learning Based User Fingerprinting Using Electromagnetic Signals

Understanding the nature of user-device interactions (e.g., who is using the device and what he/she is doing with it) is critical to many applications including time management, user profiles, and privacy protection. However, in scenarios where mobile devices are shared among family members or multiple employees in a company, conventional account-based statistics are not meaningful. This poses an even bigger problem when dealing with sensitive data. Moreover, fingerprint readers and front-facing cameras were not designed to continuously identify users. In this study, we developed MagPrint, a novel approach to fingerprint users based on unique patterns in the electromagnetic (EM) signals associated with the specific use patterns of users. Initial experiments showed that time-varying EM patterns are unique to individual users. They are also temporally and spatially consistent, which makes them suitable for fingerprinting. MagPrint has a number of advantages over existing schemes: i) Non-intrusive fingerprinting, ii) implementation using a small and easy-to-deploy device, and iii) high accuracy thanks to the proposed classification algorithm. In experiments involving 30 users, MagPrint achieves 94.3% accuracy in classifying users from these traces, which represents an 10.9% improvement over the state-of-the-art classification method.