User evaluation of lightweight user authentication with a single tri-axis accelerometer

  • Authors:

  • Jiayang Liu;Lin Zhong;Jehan Wickramasuriya;Venu Vasudevan

  • Affiliations:

  • Rice University, Houston, TX;Rice University, Houston, TX;Motorola Inc., Schaumburg, IL;Motorola Inc., Schaumburg, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We report a series of user studies that evaluate the feasibility and usability of light-weight user authentication with a single tri-axis accelerometer. We base our investigation on uWave, a state-of-the-art recognition system for user-created free-space manipulation, or gestures. Our user studies address two types of user authentication: non-critical authentication (or identification) for a user to retrieve privacy-insensitive data; and critical authentication for protecting privacy-sensitive data. For non-critical authentication, our evaluation shows that uWave achieves high recognition accuracy (98%) and its usability is comparable with text ID-based authentication. Our results also highlight the importance of constraints for users to select their gestures. For critical authentication, the evaluation shows uWave achieves state-of-the-art resilience to attacks with 3% false positives and 3% false negatives, or 3% equal error rate. We also show that the equal error rate increases to 10% if the attackers see the users performing their gestures. This shows the limitation of gesture-based authentication and highlights the need for visual concealment.