Touch Screen Based Authentication

This paper investigates multi-touch gestures for user authentication on touch sensitive devices. A multi-touch gesture matching algorithm robust to orientation and translation was developed. Authentication has become an essential component in daily life. With the booming of smart phone and high-speed wireless networks in recent years, applications and data have been shifting from desktop to mobile devices at a vigorous pace. Although mobile computing provides great convenience in daily life, it becomes vulnerable to various types of emerging attacks. User authentication plays an indispensable role in protecting computer systems and applications, but the development of touchscreen hardware and user habit change post requirements for new authentication methods for mobile and tablets devices. In this paper, I present a robust user authentication scheme using both static and dynamic features of touch gestures. I take advantage of the pressure sensitivity of multi-touch screens to obtain irreproducible biometric patterns. Discriminative features such as distance, angle, and pressure are extracted from the touch-point data, and used in statistical analysis for verification. Based on these results, I conclude that the proposed scheme overcomes the limitations of the existing user authentication methods, and shows great potential to provide robust protection against unauthorized access.