A Context-Aware Authentication Approach Based on Behavioral Definitions

Mobile devices are becoming mandatory equipment in modern life and are increasingly being used as devices in various distributed computing environments to allow users to be connected to their companies and institutions anytime and anywhere. However, connections are usually based on traditional authentication processes, which do not consider the environmental characteristics, application’s requirements and information provided by sensors present in the pervasive space. A context-based approach can represent a useful alternative for circumventing threats in a mobile computing scenario. In this paper, it is presented an approach that adopts user authentication on mobile devices based on a spatio-temporal context. This behavior is modeled trough explicit and implicit profiles, which define events and tasks that compound the user activity. This approach presents a more dynamic and reliable policy for authenticating users. In addition, experimental results indicate a relevant efficiency of proposal using a space-time permutation model to detect authentication anomalies.