SenGuard: Passive user identification on smartphones using multiple sensors

Abstract

User identification and access control have become a high demand feature on mobile devices because those devices are wildly used by employees in corporations and government agencies for business and store increasing amount of sensitive data. This paper describes SenGuard, a user identification framework that enables continuous and implicit user identification service for smartphone. Different from traditional active user authentication and access control, SenGuard leverages availability of multiple sensors on today's smartphones and passively use sensor inputs as sources of user authentication. It extracts sensor modality dependent user identification features from captured sensor data and performs user identification at background. SenGuard invokes active user authentication when there is a mounting evidence that the phone user has changed. In addition, SenGuard uses a novel virtualization based system architecture as a safeguard to prevent subversion of the background user identification mechanism by moving it into a privileged virtual domain. An initial prototype of SenGuard was created using four sensor modalities including, voice, location, multitouch, and locomotion. Preliminary empirical studies with a set of users indicate that those four modalities are suited as data sources for implicit mobile user identification.