HMOG: New Behavioral Biometric Features for Continuous Authentication of Smartphone Users

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 11; no. 5; pp. 877 - 892
• Main Authors: Sitova, Zdenka, Sedenka, Jaroslav, Qing Yang, Ge Peng, Gang Zhou, Gasti, Paolo, Balagani, Kiran S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accelerometers; Authentication; Behavioral biometrics; biometric key generation; continuous authentication; Energy consumption; energy evaluation; Feature extraction; Gyroscopes; HMOG; Legged locomotion; Magnetometers; Resistance; Smartphones; Behavioral biometrics; energy evaluation; HMOG; continuous authentication; biometric key generation
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2015.2506542

We introduce hand movement, orientation, and grasp (HMOG), a set of behavioral features to continuously authenticate smartphone users. HMOG features unobtrusively capture subtle micro-movement and orientation dynamics resulting from how a user grasps, holds, and taps on the smartphone. We evaluated authentication and biometric key generation (BKG) performance of HMOG features on data collected from 100 subjects typing on a virtual keyboard. Data were collected under two conditions: 1) sitting and 2) walking. We achieved authentication equal error rates (EERs) as low as 7.16% (walking) and 10.05% (sitting) when we combined HMOG, tap, and keystroke features. We performed experiments to investigate why HMOG features perform well during walking. Our results suggest that this is due to the ability of HMOG features to capture distinctive body movements caused by walking, in addition to the hand-movement dynamics from taps. With BKG, we achieved the EERs of 15.1% using HMOG combined with taps. In comparison, BKG using tap, key hold, and swipe features had EERs between 25.7% and 34.2%. We also analyzed the energy consumption of HMOG feature extraction and computation. Our analysis shows that HMOG features extracted at a 16-Hz sensor sampling rate incurred a minor overhead of 7.9% without sacrificing authentication accuracy. Two points distinguish our work from current literature: 1) we present the results of a comprehensive evaluation of three types of features (HMOG, keystroke, and tap) and their combinations under the same experimental conditions and 2) we analyze the features from three perspectives (authentication, BKG, and energy consumption on smartphones).