Continuous mobile authentication using touchscreen gestures

Securing the sensitive data stored and accessed from mobile devices makes user authentication a problem of paramount importance. The tension between security and usability renders however the task of user authentication on mobile devices a challenging task. This paper introduces FAST (Fingergestures Authentication System using Touchscreen), a novel touchscreen based authentication approach on mobile devices. Besides extracting touch data from touchscreen equipped smartphones, FAST complements and validates this data using a digital sensor glove that we have built using off-the-shelf components. FAST leverages state-of-the-art classification algorithms to provide transparent and continuous mobile system protection. A notable feature is FAST ´s continuous, user transparent post-login authentication. We use touch data collected from 40 users to show that FAST achieves a False Accept Rate (FAR) of 4.66% and False Reject Rate of 0.13% for the continuous post-login user authentication. The low FAR and FRR values indicate that FAST provides excellent post-login access security, without disturbing the honest mobile users.