Swipe gestures for user authentication in smartphones

• Published in: Journal of information security and applications Vol. 74; p. 103450
• Main Authors: Chao, Jedrik, Hossain, Md Shafaeat, Lancor, Lisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.05.2023
• Subjects: Authentication; Biometrics; Smartphone security; Swipe gesture; Touchscreen; Biometrics; Touchscreen; Swipe gesture; Smartphone security; Authentication
• ISSN: 2214-2126
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jisa.2023.103450

As more people rely on smartphones to store sensitive information, the need for robust security measures is all the more pressing. Because traditional one shot authentication methods like PINs and passwords are vulnerable to various attacks, we present a behavioral biometrics based smartphone authentication system using swipes. While previous research focused on a single kind of swipe, our data set features swipes using different fingers and directions collected from 36 users across three sessions. In our system, we experimented with support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) classifiers. We investigated which finger, direction, and classifier provided the best individual swipe authentication results. Then, we analyzed whether fusion of different fingers and directions improved results. The best unimodal result came from a rightward swipe with right thumb using SVM, which resulted in an area under ROC curve (AUC) of 0.936 and an equal error rate (EER) of 0.135. We found that swipes using thumbs offered better performance. Fusion improves results for the most part, and our best result was the combination of a leftward swipe with right thumb and a leftward swipe with left thumb. This combination gave an AUC of 0.969 and EER of 0.081 with the SVM classifier.