Exploring Pressure and Stroke Curvature as critical features for user authentication on touch-screen mobile handheld devices

Abstract

The use of touchscreen mobile devices for professional and personal communication has seen a surge in the past few years. With the convenience and availability of technology, users store and access sensitive and critical data on their mobile devices, thus urging the need for higher security of mobile phones. Current mobile user authentication is mainly log-in authentication. Recent studies have started exploring continuous authentication on mobile devices. This study is part of a project that is aimed to develop more effective approaches to providing both log-in and continuous authentications by integrating the password, gesture, keystroke dynamics, and touch- dynamics. This theses research focuses on the gesture-based authentication in mobile devices and specifically on how accurate the pressure and swipe curvature can be used while taking advantage of one-handed thumb induced authentication. An empirical evaluation shows that authentication model with the pressure and swipe curvature produces an EER of 0.0204 in authenticating the user.