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DCUS: Evaluating Double-Click-Based Unlocking Scheme on Smartphones

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Abstract

With the increasing capability of software and hardware, mobile devices especially smartphones are changing the way of peoples’ communication and living styles. For the sake of convenience, people often store a lot of personal data like images on the device and use it for completing sensitive tasks like payment and financial transfer. This makes data protection more important on smartphones. To secure the device from unauthorized access, one simple and efficient method is to design a device or screen unlock mechanism, which can authenticate the identity of current user. However, most existing unlock schemes can be compromised if an attacker gets the correct pattern. In this work, we advocate that behavioral biometrics can be useful to improve the security of unlock mechanisms. We thus design DCUS, a double-click-based unlocking scheme on smartphones, which requires users to unlock the device by double clicking on the right location on an image. For user authentication, our scheme needs to check the selected images, image location and double-click patterns. In the evaluation, we perform a user study with 60 participants and make a comparison between our scheme and a similar unlock scheme. With several typical supervised classifiers, it is found that participants can perform well under our scheme.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants for their hard work in the user study. This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61802080 and 61802077).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, Guangzhou University, No.230 Waihuaxi Road, Panyu, 510006, Guangzhou, China

    Wenjuan Li & Yu Wang

  2. Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Wenjuan Li

  3. KOTO Research Center, Macao, China

    Jiao Tan & Nan Zhu

Authors
  1. Wenjuan Li
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  2. Yu Wang
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  3. Jiao Tan
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  4. Nan Zhu
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Correspondence to Yu Wang.

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A preliminary version of this paper has been presented at the First International Symposium on Emerging Information Security and Applications (EISA) in conjunction with SpaCCS 2020 [1].

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Li, W., Wang, Y., Tan, J. et al. DCUS: Evaluating Double-Click-Based Unlocking Scheme on Smartphones. Mobile Netw Appl 27, 382–391 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-021-01842-1

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