Implicit One-handed Mobile User Authentication by Induced Thumb Biometrics on Touch-screen Handheld Devices
People often store private and sensitive data on their mobile devices, and the security of these devices is essential. This project advances and develops a new process for verifying a user’s legitimate right to access a mobile device. Existing research has not made this process very usable for many people who lack dexterity or the use of both hands. This research aims to design and develop a method for one-handed authentication on a touch-screen mobile handheld device.
The objective is to improve both security and usability of authentication. The proposed methods also will detect unauthorized access to a mobile device in a continuous manner, even if the password is stolen. The interdisciplinary nature of this work will promote teaching, training, and education in mobile security and privacy, human-computer interaction, mobile accessibility, machine learning, and behavioral science. The researchers will actively engage students at both graduate and undergraduate levels in their research activities, and make a strong effort to engage women and underrepresented minorities.
The project will support one-handed mobile authentication on a touch-screen mobile handheld device by inducing thumb biometrics and by enabling one-handed text entry based on thumb strokes. This project will advance authentication research and practice by:
(1) laying the groundwork for one-handed authentication in support of both point-of-entry and implicit continuous authentication;
(2) introducing a new venue for improving the security of one-handed authentication by inducing and fusing thumb biometrics from user interactions with a touch-screen mobile device;
(3) creating new design principles for improving the usability of mobile authentication; and
(4) addressing accessibility challenges for users with situational or visual impairments via the support of keypress-less text entry on a mobile touch screen. This project will lend itself to a new solution that can address the common security-usability tradeoff of mobile authentication methods.
Selected publications
Wang, K., Zhou, L., and Zhang, D. (2019). Making Smartphones More Secure and Usable: An Exploratory Study on User Preferences and Situational Needs of Mobile User Authentication Methods. The 17th IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2019). Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. July 1-3, 2019
Zhang, D., Zhou, L., and Pisupati, S. (2019). Tracing One’s Touches: Continuous Mobile User Authentication Based on Touch Dynamics. The 25th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2019). August 15-17, 2019. Cancun, Mexico.
Zhang, D., Kang, Y., Zhou, L. and Lai, J. (2016). Continuous User Authentication on Touch-screen Mobile Devices: Toward More Secure and Usable M-Commerce. The Fifteenth Workshop on e-Business (WeB 2016). Dec. 10, 2016. Dublin, Ireland. READ
Zhou, L., Kang, Y., Zhang, D. and Lai, J. (2016). Harmonized Thumb Stroke Based User Authentication for Touch-screen Mobile Phones. Decision Support Systems. 92,14-24. READ