Multi-modal biometrics for mobile authentication

Abstract

User authentication in the context of a secure transaction needs to be continuously evaluated for the risks associated with the transaction authorization. The situation becomes even more critical when there are regulatory compliance requirements. Need for such systems have grown dramatically with the introduction of smart mobile devices which make it far easier for the user to complete such transaction quickly but with a huge exposure to risk. Biometrics can play a very significant role in addressing such problems as a key indicator of the user identity and thus reducing the risk of fraud. While unimodal biometrics authentication systems are being increasingly experimented by mainstream mobile system manufacturers (e.g., fingerprint in iOS), we explore various opportunities of reducing risk in a multimodal biometrics system. The multimodal system is based on fusion of several biometrics combined with a policy manager. A new biometric modality: chirography which is based on user writing on multi-touch screens using their finger is introduced. Coupling with chirography, we also use two other biometrics: face and voice. Our fusion strategy is based on inter-modality score level fusion that takes into account a voice quality measure. The proposed system has been evaluated on an in-house database that reflects the latest smart mobile devices. On this database, we demonstrate a very high accuracy multi-modal authentication system reaching an EER of 0.1% in an office environment and an EER of 0.5% in challenging noisy environments.