Making the most of what you have! Profiling biometric authentication on mobile devices

Abstract

In order to provide the additional security required by modern mobile devices, biometric methods and Continuous Authentication(CA) systems are getting popular. Most existing work on CA are concerned about achieving higher accuracy or fusing multiple modalities. However, in a mobile environment there are more constraints on the resources available. This work is the first to compare between different biometric modalities based on the resources they use. We do this by determining the Resource Profile Curve (RPC) for each modality. This Curve reveals the trade-off between authentication accuracy and resource usage, and is helpful for different usage scenarios in which a CA system needs to operate. In particular, we explain how a CA system can intelligently switch between RPCs to conserve battery power, memory usage, or to maximize authentication accuracy. We argue that RPCs ought to guide the development of practical CA systems.