VibPath: Two-Factor Authentication with Your Hand’s Vibration Response to Unlock Your Phone

(presented in 2023 Ubicomp conference) [Paper link]

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Technical advances in the smart device market have fixated smartphones at the heart of our lives, warranting an ever more secure means of authentication. Although most smartphones have adopted biometrics-based authentication, after a couple of failed attempts, most users are given the option to quickly bypass the system with passcodes. To add a layer of security, two-factor authentication (2FA) has been implemented but has proven to be vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, we introduce VibPath, a simultaneous 2FA scheme that can understand the user’s hand neuromuscular system through touch behavior. VibPath captures the individual’s vibration path responses between the hand and the wrist with the attention-based encoder-decoder network, authenticating the genuine users from the imposters unobtrusively. In a user study with 30 participants, VibPath achieved an average performance of 0.98 accuracy, 0.99 precision, 0.98 recall, 0.98 f1-score for user verification, and 94.3% accuracy for user identification across five passcodes. Furthermore, we also conducted several extensive studies, including in-the-wile, permanence, vulnerability, usability, and system overhead studies, to assess the practicability and viability of the VibPath from multiple aspects.

_{[1] Choi, S., Yim, J., Kim, S. J., Jin, Y., Wu, D., & Jin, Z. (2023). VibPath: Two-Factor Authentication with Your Hand’s Vibration Response to Unlock Your Phone. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 7(3), 1-26}