TouchPass: Towards behavior-irrelevant on-touch user authentication on smartphones leveraging vibrations

With increasing private and sensitive data stored in mobile devices, secure and effective mobile-based user authentication schemes are desired. As the most natural way to contact with mobile devices, finger touches have shown potentials for user authentication. Most existing approaches utilize finger touches as behavioral biometrics for identifying individuals, which are vulnerable to spoofer attacks. To resist attacks for on-touch user authentication on mobile devices, this paper exploits physical characters of touching fingers by investigating active vibration signal transmission through fingers, and we find that physical characters of touching fingers present unique patterns on active vibration signals for different individuals. Based on the observation, we propose a behavior-irrelevant on-touch user authentication system, TouchPass, which leverages active vibration signals on smartphones to extract only physical characters of touching fingers for user identification. TouchPass first extracts features that mix physical characters of touching fingers and behavior biometrics of touching behaviors from vibration signals generated and received by smartphones. Then, we design a Siamese network-based architecture with a specific training sample selection strategy to reconstruct the extracted signal features to behavior-irrelevant features and further build a behavior-irrelevant on-touch user authentication scheme leveraging knowledge distillation. Our extensive experiments validate that TouchPass can accurately authenticate users and defend various attacks.