A Novel Touchscreen-Based Authentication Scheme Using Static and Dynamic Hand Biometrics

With the booming of smart phone and high-speed wireless networks in recent years, applications and data have been shifting from desktop to mobile devices at a vigorous pace. Although mobile computing provides great convenience in daily life, it becomes vulnerable to various types of emerging attacks. User authentication plays an indispensable role in protecting computer systems and applications, but the development of touch screen hardware and user habit change post requirements for new authentication methods for mobile and tablets devices. In this paper, we present a robust user authentication scheme using both static and dynamic features of touch gestures. We take advantage of the pressure sensitivity of multi-touch screens to obtain irreproducible biometric patterns. Discriminative features such as distance, angle, and pressure are extracted from the touch-point data, and used in statistical analysis for verification. We tested our scheme in a variety of experiments that involved multiple volunteers to perform various gestures. The analysis of experimental results and user feedback indicate the proposed scheme delivers comprehensive measurements and accurate pattern classification for touch gestures. Based on these results, we conclude that the proposed scheme overcomes the limitations of the existing user authentication methods, and shows great potential to provide robust protection against unauthorized access.