LUCIDS: An Ultra-lightweight Swipe Characteristics Based Continuous Authentication Framework for Smartphones and Tablets

Abstract

Smartphones and tablets are convenient and popular portable devices with processing power and memory comparable to laptops and desktops. Their connectivity and networking capabilities add to their appeal. Operated through a touchscreen interface, these devices are highly user-friendly. Users store important data and apps for online shopping, banking, and security system monitoring on them. Typically, passwords, pattern locks, face-scans or PINs are used to protect these devices. However, after logging in if left unattended, these devices can be easily accessed by an intruder. Therefore, there is a need for a secondary security mechanism to maintain authentication even after the user logs in. And it is desirable to do this without requiring extra user attention. This paper discusses Continuous Authentication (CA) methods for both tablets and smartphones, which provide continuous and unobtrusive user authentication as a secondary security measure. An unobtrusive ultra-lightweight framework is introduced to implement this using a 117 users’ dataset. The authentication performance of the framework was compared with state-of-the-art methods which use smartphones and also those using tablets. The results were competitive in both the scenarios. The framework uses only a single stroke swipe data for authentication eliminating any need for additional sensors data and providing detection at the earliest.