A Framework for Behavioral Biometric Authentication Using Deep Metric Learning on Mobile Devices

Mobile authentication using behavioral biometrics has been an active area of research. Existing research relies on building machine learning classifiers to recognize an individual’s unique patterns. However, these classifiers are not powerful enough to learn the discriminative features. When implemented on the mobile devices, they face new challenges from the behavioral dynamics, data privacy and side-channel leaks. To address these challenges, we present a new framework to incorporate training on battery-powered mobile devices, so private data never leaves the device and training can be flexibly scheduled to adapt the behavioral patterns at runtime. We re-formulate the classification problem into deep metric learning to improve the discriminative power and design an effective countermeasure to thwart side-channel leaks by embedding a noise signature in the sensing signals without sacrificing too much usability. The experiments demonstrate authentication accuracy over 95 percent on three public datasets, a sheer 15 percent gain from multi-class classification with less data and robustness against brute-force and side-channel attacks with 99 and 90 percent success, respectively. We show the feasibility of training with mobile CPUs, where training 100 epochs takes less than 10 mins and can be boosted 3-5 times with feature transfer. Finally, we profile memory, energy and computational overhead. Our results indicate that training consumes lower energy than watching videos and slightly higher energy than playing games.