Mind how you answer me!: transparently authenticating the user of a smartphone when answering or placing a call

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new biometric measure to authenticate the user of a smartphone: the movement the user performs when answering (or placing) a phone call. The biometric measure leverages features that are becoming commodities in new smartphones, i.e. accelerometer and orientation sensors. We argue that this new biometric measure has a unique feature. That is, it allows a transparent authentication (not requiring an additional specific interaction for this) to check that the user that is answering (or placing) a phone call is the one authorized to do that. At the same time, this biometric measure can also be used as a non transparent authentication method, e.g. the user may need to move the phone as if answering a call, in order to unlock the phone to get access to SMSs or emails. As a consequence of being a biometric measure, an adversary that spies on the movement (e.g. captures it with a camera) and tries to replicate it, will not be granted access to the phone. We prototyped our solution and conducted several experiments to assess its feasibility. Results show that the method is effective, and the performance is comparable to that of other transparent authentication methods, like face or voice recognition.