The 8th EAI International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services

Research Article

You Are What You Use: An Initial Study of Authenticating Mobile Users via Application Usage

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.30-11-2016.2267094,
        author={Jonathan Voris and Yingbo Song and Malek Ben Salem and Salvatore Stolfo},
        title={You Are What You Use: An Initial Study of Authenticating Mobile Users via Application Usage},
        proceedings={The 8th EAI International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={MOBICASE},
        year={2016},
        month={12},
        keywords={mobile platform security active authentication behavioral biometrics},
        doi={10.4108/eai.30-11-2016.2267094}
    }
    
  • Jonathan Voris
    Yingbo Song
    Malek Ben Salem
    Salvatore Stolfo
    Year: 2016
    You Are What You Use: An Initial Study of Authenticating Mobile Users via Application Usage
    MOBICASE
    ACM
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.30-11-2016.2267094
Jonathan Voris1,*, Yingbo Song2, Malek Ben Salem3, Salvatore Stolfo2
  • 1: New York Institute of Technology
  • 2: Allure Security Technology
  • 3: Accenture Technology Labs
*Contact email: jvoris@nyit.edu

Abstract

Mobile smartphone devices are vulnerable to masquerade attacks because they can be easily lost or stolen. This paper introduces a technique for detecting unauthorized users by modeling the legitimate user's typical behavior when using their mobile phone. The user's behavior model augments typical authentication mechanisms (such as PINs or fingerprints) to provide continuous authentication while a device is in use. A preliminary human user study was conducted in order to assess the viability of our application usage oriented authentication approach. The results of our initial experiment demonstrate that our system is capable of detecting an unauthorized user within 2 minutes.