Certain investigations on touch dynamics for user authentication on touch screen mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices like smart phones and Personal Digital Assistants PDA play an increasingly important role in the digital environment The devices are equipped with applications that are geared to store sensitive data in addition to the standard contacts tasks and scheduling utilities The invariable applications of these devices brings new security and privacy risks In addition when the devices are used continuously the users tend to leave the traces of their identities and transactions Hence user authentication plays a vital role Authentication is a process to identify individuals and verify their eligibility to access a system or a device in a secured manner It is a security measure designed to protect any system against imposters Methods for authentication are generally classified into three categories1 Techniques based on passwords pin codes and passphrases 2 Techniques based on one time passwords OTPs 3 Techniques using unique features of a human body like the physiological features or the behavioural characteristics Though these technologies provide different levels of security none has been proven to secure the system completely While deploying biometrics for user authentication it demands either an identification process or verification process before providing access privileges to the user Based on the application authentication isof two categories namely static authentication and continuous authentication Static authentication verifies the identity before entering a system whereas continuous authentication verifies the identity even after the user has entered into the system. newline