Toward Mobile Authentication with Keystroke Dynamics on Mobile Phones and Tablets

Security and protection of personal data are becoming more and more important. At the same time, we see a steady rise of very powerful mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices offer most capabilities of desktop computers. Even today, they are often used for storing or accessing individual data. In the near future, it is obviously desirable to use their Internet capability to access private data or even business intra-nets from everywhere. Therefore, new security mechanisms must be designed. In this paper, we only focus on the authentication part (and ignore OS and network issues). Traditional methods for authentication (like smartcards or face recognition) may not be used in every context because of hardware and environment limitations (dark environments or camera restrictions in business). Therefore, we suggest to develop a mixture of a keystroke-based and a handwriting-based authentication method using capacitive displays. In this paper, we will briefly discuss limitations of existing approaches and why we believe that keystroke and handwriting authentication is a possible way for improving the security on mobile devices. First experiments will demonstrate the effectivity of this new approach with error rates under 2%.