Touchalytics: On the Applicability of Touchscreen Input as a Behavioral Biometric for Continuous Authentication

We investigate whether a classifier can continuously authenticate users based on the way they interact with the touchscreen of a smart phone. We propose a set of 30 behavioral touch features that can be extracted from raw touchscreen logs and demonstrate that different users populate distinct subspaces of this feature space. In a systematic experiment designed to test how this behavioral pattern exhibits consistency over time, we collected touch data from users interacting with a smart phone using basic navigation maneuvers, i.e., up-down and left-right scrolling. We propose a classification framework that learns the touch behavior of a user during an enrollment phase and is able to accept or reject the current user by monitoring interaction with the touch screen. The classifier achieves a median equal error rate of 0% for intra-session authentication, 2%-3% for inter-session authentication and below 4% when the authentication test was carried out one week after the enrollment phase. While our experimental findings disqualify this method as a standalone authentication mechanism for long-term authentication, it could be implemented as a means to extend screen-lock time or as a part of a multi-modal biometric authentication system.Comment: to appear at IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security; Download data from http://www.mariofrank.net/touchalytics

VELOS : a VR platform for ship-evacuation analysis

Virtual Environment for Life On Ships (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This article focuses on presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: (i) capability of multiple users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, (ii) real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment events and crowd-behavior parameters, (iii) capability of agents and avatars to move continuously on decks, (iv) integrated framework for both the simplified and advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, (v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model suitable for evacuation analysis, (vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and (vii) post-processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information for the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using three evacuation test cases for a ro–ro passenger ship

BotSwindler: Tamper Resistant Injection of Believable Decoys in VM-Based Hosts for Crimeware Detection

We introduce BotSwindler, a bait injection system designed to delude and detect crimeware by forcing it to reveal during the exploitation of monitored information. The implementation of BotSwindler relies upon an out-of-host software agent that drives user-like interactions in a virtual machine, seeking to convince malware residing within the guest OS that it has captured legitimate credentials. To aid in the accuracy and realism of the simulations, we propose a low overhead approach, called virtual machine verification, for verifying whether the guest OS is in one of a predefined set of states. We present results from experiments with real credential-collecting malware that demonstrate the injection of monitored financial bait for detecting compromises. Additionally, using a computational analysis and a user study, we illustrate the believability of the simulations and we demonstrate that they are sufficiently human-like. Finally, we provide results from performance measurements to show our approach does not impose a performance burden

Continuous and transparent multimodal authentication: reviewing the state of the art

Individuals, businesses and governments undertake an ever-growing range of activities online and via various Internet-enabled digital devices. Unfortunately, these activities, services, information and devices are the targets of cybercrimes. Verifying the user legitimacy to use/access a digital device or service has become of the utmost importance. Authentication is the frontline countermeasure of ensuring only the authorized user is granted access; however, it has historically suffered from a range of issues related to the security and usability of the approaches. They are also still mostly functioning at the point of entry and those performing sort of re-authentication executing it in an intrusive manner. Thus, it is apparent that a more innovative, convenient and secure user authentication solution is vital. This paper reviews the authentication methods along with the current use of authentication technologies, aiming at developing a current state-of-the-art and identifying the open problems to be tackled and available solutions to be adopted. It also investigates whether these authentication technologies have the capability to fill the gap between high security and user satisfaction. This is followed by a literature review of the existing research on continuous and transparent multimodal authentication. It concludes that providing users with adequate protection and convenience requires innovative robust authentication mechanisms to be utilized in a universal level. Ultimately, a potential federated biometric authentication solution is presented; however it needs to be developed and extensively evaluated, thus operating in a transparent, continuous and user-friendly manner

Seamless Authentication for Ubiquitous Devices

User authentication is an integral part of our lives; we authenticate ourselves to personal computers and a variety of other things several times a day. Authentication is burdensome. When we wish to access to a computer or a resource, it is an additional task that we need to perform~-- an interruption in our workflow. In this dissertation, we study people\u27s authentication behavior and attempt to make authentication to desktops and smartphones less burdensome for users. First, we present the findings of a user study we conducted to understand people\u27s authentication behavior: things they authenticate to, how and when they authenticate, authentication errors they encounter and why, and their opinions about authentication. In our study, participants performed about 39 authentications per day on average; the majority of these authentications were to personal computers (desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet) and with passwords, but the number of authentications to other things (e.g., car, door) was not insignificant. We saw a high failure rate for desktop and laptop authentication among our participants, affirming the need for a more usable authentication method. Overall, we found that authentication was a noticeable part of all our participants\u27 lives and burdensome for many participants, but they accepted it as cost of security, devising their own ways to cope with it. Second, we propose a new approach to authentication, called bilateral authentication, that leverages wrist-wearable technology to enable seamless authentication for things that people use with their hands, while wearing a smart wristband. In bilateral authentication two entities (e.g., user\u27s wristband and the user\u27s phone) share their knowledge (e.g., about user\u27s interaction with the phone) to verify the user\u27s identity. Using this approach, we developed a seamless authentication method for desktops and smartphones. Our authentication method offers quick and effortless authentication, continuous user verification while the desktop (or smartphone) is in use, and automatic deauthentication after use. We evaluated our authentication method through four in-lab user studies, evaluating the method\u27s usability and security from the system and the user\u27s perspective. Based on the evaluation, our authentication method shows promise for reducing users\u27 authentication burden for desktops and smartphones