User authentication and identification on smartphones by incorporating capacitive touchscreen

Smartphones, while providing users ease of access to sensitive information on the go, also present severe security risks if an attacker is able to gain access to them. To strengthen the user authentication and identification in a smartphone, we develop a biometric authentication and identification system which uses the capacitive touchscreen that is featured in all current smartphones. Our methodology focuses on using the touchscreen as a sensor to capture the image of a user's ear, thumb or four fingers. We extract the capacitive raw data from the touched body part to obtain a capacitive image, and then use it to capture geometric features (e.g., length and width of a finger) and principal components. After that, we experiment with Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classifiers to verify and also identify each user. We achieved the maximum authentication accuracy of 98.84% by four fingers with SVM, and maxinum identification accuracy of 97.61% by four fingers with RF.