Multimodal three-dimensional dynamic signature

Abstract

Reliable authentication in mobile applications is among the most important information security challenges. Today, we can hardly imagine a person who would not own a mobile device that connects to the Internet. Mobile devices are being used to store large amounts of confidential information, ranging from personal photos to electronic banking tools. In 2009, colleagues from Rice University together with their collaborators from Motorola, proposed an authentication through in-air gestures. This and subsequent work contributing to the development of the method are reviewed in our introduction. At the moment, there exists a version of the gesture-based authentication software available for Android mobile devices. This software has not become widespread yet. One of likely reasons for that is the insufficient reliability of the method, which involves similar to its earlier analogs the use of only one device. Here we discuss the authentication based on the multimodal three-dimensional dynamic signature (MTDS) performed by two independent mobile devices. The MTDS-based authentication technique is an advanced version of in-air gesture authentication. We describe the operation of a prototype of MTDS-based authentication, including the main implemented algorithms, as well as some preliminary results of testing the software. We expect that our method can be used in any mobile application, provided a number of additional improvements discussed in the conclusion are made.

Keywords

• authentication
• mobile device
• accelerometer
• personalized gestured
• signature