Your Phone Knows You: Almost Transparent Authentication for Smartphones

With the advent of ever more powerful smart phones, having bigger touch screens and a large assortment of exciting applications accessible through online app stores, people are using their phones to meet various ends, even critical tasks, like: mobile banking and mobile health-care, are being performed using smart phones. Although security of smart phones is vital, application-level security - in the form of end-user authentication - is often the only security mechanism that users adopt. We propose a transparent and adaptive authentication framework for smart phones that is built around the biological metaphor of how a pet recognizes its owner. Our proposed framework rids the user from remembering a strong secret and from inputting the secret via smart phone´s small keypad time and again, while the pet metaphor helps assuage possible psychological issues related to the covert nature of the authentication method. We implemented a subset of our proposed framework on the Android platform and through data obtained from users, we show that the proposed framework has the potential to become effective, efficient, and popular.