You are How You Touch: User Verification on Smartphones via Tapping Behaviors Nan Zheng∗, Kun Baiy, Hai Huangy and Haining Wangz ∗College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA yIBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA zUniversity of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA Email:
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[email protected] Abstract—Smartphone users have their own unique behavioral could even exploit the oily residues left on the screen of a patterns when tapping on the touch screens. These personal smartphone to derive the passcode [6]. Therefore, it is highly patterns are reflected on the different rhythm, strength, and desirable to enhance the smartphone’s user authentication with angle preferences of the applied force. Since smartphones are equipped with various sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, a non-intrusive user verification mechanism, which is user- and touch screen sensors, capturing a user’s tapping behaviors transparent and is able to further verify if the successfully can be done seamlessly. Exploiting the combination of four logged-in user is the true owner of a smartphone. features (acceleration, pressure, size, and time) extracted from In this paper, we explore the feasibility of utilizing user smartphone sensors, we propose a non-intrusive user verification tapping behaviors for user verification in a passcode-enabled mechanism to substantiate whether an authenticating user is the true owner of the smartphone or an impostor who happens to smartphone. The rationale behind our work is that individual know the passcode. Based on the tapping data collected from human users have their own unique behavioral patterns while over 80 users, we conduct a series of experiments to validate the tapping on the touch screen of a smartphone.