Active User Authentication for Smartphones: A Challenge Data Set and Benchmark Results

In this paper, automated user verification techniques for smartphones are investigated. A unique non-commercial dataset, the University of Maryland Active Authentication Dataset 02 (UMDAA-02) for multi-modal user authentication research is introduced. This paper focuses on three sensors - front camera, touch sensor and location service while providing a general description for other modalities. Benchmark results for face detection, face verification, touch-based user identification and location-based next-place prediction are presented, which indicate that more robust methods fine-tuned to the mobile platform are needed to achieve satisfactory verification accuracy. The dataset will be made available to the research community for promoting additional research.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. Best poster award at BTAS 201

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

PATH: Person Authentication using Trace Histories

In this paper, a solution to the problem of Active Authentication using trace histories is addressed. Specifically, the task is to perform user verification on mobile devices using historical location traces of the user as a function of time. Considering the movement of a human as a Markovian motion, a modified Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based solution is proposed. The proposed method, namely the Marginally Smoothed HMM (MSHMM), utilizes the marginal probabilities of location and timing information of the observations to smooth-out the emission probabilities while training. Hence, it can efficiently handle unforeseen observations during the test phase. The verification performance of this method is compared to a sequence matching (SM) method , a Markov Chain-based method (MC) and an HMM with basic Laplace Smoothing (HMM-lap). Experimental results using the location information of the UMD Active Authentication Dataset-02 (UMDAA02) and the GeoLife dataset are presented. The proposed MSHMM method outperforms the compared methods in terms of equal error rate (EER). Additionally, the effects of different parameters on the proposed method are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Best Paper award at IEEE UEMCON 201

Biometric Security for Cell Phones

Cell phones are already prime targets for theft. The increasing functionality of cell phones is making them even more attractive. With the increase of cell phone functionality including personal digital assistance, banking, e-commerce, remote work, internet access and entertainment, more and more confidential data is stored on these devices. What is protecting this confidential data stored on cell phones? Studies have shown that even though most of the cell phone users are aware of the PIN security feature more than 50% of them are not using it either because of the lack of confidence in it or because of the inconvenience. A large majority of those users believes that an alternative approach to security would be a good idea.biometrics, security, fingerprint, face recognition, cell phones

Deep Feature-based Face Detection on Mobile Devices

We propose a deep feature-based face detector for mobile devices to detect user's face acquired by the front facing camera. The proposed method is able to detect faces in images containing extreme pose and illumination variations as well as partial faces. The main challenge in developing deep feature-based algorithms for mobile devices is the constrained nature of the mobile platform and the non-availability of CUDA enabled GPUs on such devices. Our implementation takes into account the special nature of the images captured by the front-facing camera of mobile devices and exploits the GPUs present in mobile devices without CUDA-based frameorks, to meet these challenges.Comment: ISBA 201