Surveying the Development of Biometric User Authentication on Mobile Phones

TLDR

Designing reliable user authentication on mobile phones is increasingly important to protect private information, and biometric approaches—leveraging physiological and behavioral characteristics—offer advantages over traditional methods for authenticating legitimate users and identifying impostors. The paper surveys existing biometric authentication techniques on mobile phones, especially touch-enabled devices, and proposes a framework for reliable multimodal authentication. The authors present a taxonomy of biometric efforts, analyze deployment feasibility on touch-enabled phones, and characterize a generic system with eight attack points, surveying practical attacks and countermeasures. Experimental validation shows that multimodal biometrics using touch dynamics significantly reduce false rates compared to single biometrics, and the authors highlight remaining challenges while anticipating touch dynamics becoming mainstream.

Abstract

Designing reliable user authentication on mobile phones is becoming an increasingly important task to protect users' private information and data. Since biometric approaches can provide many advantages over the traditional authentication methods, they have become a significant topic for both academia and industry. The major goal of biometric user authentication is to authenticate legitimate users and identify impostors based on physiological and behavioral characteristics. In this paper, we survey the development of existing biometric authentication techniques on mobile phones, particularly on touch-enabled devices, with reference to 11 biometric approaches (five physiological and six behavioral). We present a taxonomy of existing efforts regarding biometric authentication on mobile phones and analyze their feasibility of deployment on touch-enabled mobile phones. In addition, we systematically characterize a generic biometric authentication system with eight potential attack points and survey practical attacks and potential countermeasures on mobile phones. Moreover, we propose a framework for establishing a reliable authentication mechanism through implementing a multimodal biometric user authentication in an appropriate way. Experimental results are presented to validate this framework using touch dynamics, and the results show that multimodal biometrics can be deployed on touch-enabled phones to significantly reduce the false rates of a single biometric system. Finally, we identify challenges and open problems in this area and suggest that touch dynamics will become a mainstream aspect in designing future user authentication on mobile phones.