Transparent authentication: Utilising heart rate for user authentication

There has been exponential growth in the use of wearable technologies in the last decade with smart watches having a large share of the market. Smart watches were primarily used for health and fitness purposes but recent years have seen a rise in their deployment in other areas. Recent smart watches are fitted with sensors with enhanced functionality and capabilities. For example, some function as standalone device with the ability to create activity logs and transmit data to a secondary device. The capability has contributed to their increased usage in recent years with researchers focusing on their potential. This paper explores the ability to extract physiological data from smart watch technology to achieve user authentication. The approach is suitable not only because of the capacity for data capture but also easy connectivity with other devices - principally the Smartphone. For the purpose of this study, heart rate data is captured and extracted from 30 subjects continually over an hour. While security is the ultimate goal, usability should also be key consideration. Most bioelectrical signals like heart rate are non-stationary time-dependent signals therefore Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is employed. DWT decomposes the bioelectrical signal into n level sub-bands of detail coefficients and approximation coefficients. Biorthogonal Wavelet (bior 4.4) is applied to extract features from the four levels of detail coefficents. Ten statistical features are extracted from each level of the coffecient sub-band. Classification of each sub-band levels are done using a Feedforward neural Network (FF-NN). The 1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd and 4 th levels had an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 17.20%, 18.17%, 20.93% and 21.83% respectively. To improve the EER, fusion of the four level sub-band is applied at the feature level. The proposed fusion showed an improved result over the initial result with an EER of 11.25% As a one-off authentication decision, an 11% EER is not ideal, its use on a continuous basis makes this more than feasible in practice

Assentication: User Deauthentication and Lunchtime Attack Mitigation with Seated Posture Biometric

Biometric techniques are often used as an extra security factor in authenticating human users. Numerous biometrics have been proposed and evaluated, each with its own set of benefits and pitfalls. Static biometrics (such as fingerprints) are geared for discrete operation, to identify users, which typically involves some user burden. Meanwhile, behavioral biometrics (such as keystroke dynamics) are well suited for continuous, and sometimes more unobtrusive, operation. One important application domain for biometrics is deauthentication, a means of quickly detecting absence of a previously authenticated user and immediately terminating that user's active secure sessions. Deauthentication is crucial for mitigating so called Lunchtime Attacks, whereby an insider adversary takes over (before any inactivity timeout kicks in) authenticated state of a careless user who walks away from her computer. Motivated primarily by the need for an unobtrusive and continuous biometric to support effective deauthentication, we introduce PoPa, a new hybrid biometric based on a human user's seated posture pattern. PoPa captures a unique combination of physiological and behavioral traits. We describe a low cost fully functioning prototype that involves an office chair instrumented with 16 tiny pressure sensors. We also explore (via user experiments) how PoPa can be used in a typical workplace to provide continuous authentication (and deauthentication) of users. We experimentally assess viability of PoPa in terms of uniqueness by collecting and evaluating posture patterns of a cohort of users. Results show that PoPa exhibits very low false positive, and even lower false negative, rates. In particular, users can be identified with, on average, 91.0% accuracy. Finally, we compare pros and cons of PoPa with those of several prominent biometric based deauthentication techniques

Predictive biometrics: A review and analysis of predicting personal characteristics from biometric data

Interest in the exploitation of soft biometrics information has continued to develop over the last decade or so. In comparison with traditional biometrics, which focuses principally on person identification, the idea of soft biometrics processing is to study the utilisation of more general information regarding a system user, which is not necessarily unique. There are increasing indications that this type of data will have great value in providing complementary information for user authentication. However, the authors have also seen a growing interest in broadening the predictive capabilities of biometric data, encompassing both easily definable characteristics such as subject age and, most recently, `higher level' characteristics such as emotional or mental states. This study will present a selective review of the predictive capabilities, in the widest sense, of biometric data processing, providing an analysis of the key issues still adequately to be addressed if this concept of predictive biometrics is to be fully exploited in the future

Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey

Today, digitalization decisively penetrates all the sides of the modern society. One of the key enablers to maintain this process secure is authentication. It covers many different areas of a hyper-connected world, including online payments, communications, access right management, etc. This work sheds light on the evolution of authentication systems towards Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) starting from Single-Factor Authentication (SFA) and through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Particularly, MFA is expected to be utilized for human-to-everything interactions by enabling fast, user-friendly, and reliable authentication when accessing a service. This paper surveys the already available and emerging sensors (factor providers) that allow for authenticating a user with the system directly or by involving the cloud. The corresponding challenges from the user as well as the service provider perspective are also reviewed. The MFA system based on reversed Lagrange polynomial within Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme is further proposed to enable more flexible authentication. This solution covers the cases of authenticating the user even if some of the factors are mismatched or absent. Our framework allows for qualifying the missing factors by authenticating the user without disclosing sensitive biometric data to the verification entity. Finally, a vision of the future trends in MFA is discussed.Peer reviewe