BioTouch: Reliable Re-Authentication via Finger Bio-Capacitance and Touching Behavior †

Re-authentication continuously checks to see if a user is authorized during a whole usage session, enhancing secrecy capabilities for computational devices, especially against insider attacks. However, it is challenging to design a reliable re-authentication scheme with accuracy, transparency and robustness. Specifically, the approaches of using biometric features (e.g., fingerprint, iris) are often accurate in identifying users but not transparent to them due to the need for user cooperation. On the other hand, while the approaches exploiting behavior features (e.g., touch-screen gesture, movement) are often transparent in use, their applications suffer from low accuracy and robustness as behavior information collected is subjective and may change frequently over different use situations and even user’s motion. In this paper, we propose BioTouch, a reliable re-authentication scheme that satisfies all the above requirements. First, BioTouch utilizes multiple features (finger capacitance and touching behavior) to identify the user for better accuracy. Second, BioTouch automatically works during user operation on capacitive-touch devices, achieving transparency without the need for manual assistance. Finally, by applying finger bio-capacitance, BioTouch is also robust to various conditions, as this feature is determined by the user’s physical characteristics and will not change by different user positions and motions. We implement BioTouch for proof-of-concept and conduct comprehensive evaluations. The results show that BioTouch can flag 98% of anomalous behaviors within ten touching operations and achieve up to 99.84% accuracy during usage.