Soft Biometric Traits for Continuous User Authentication

Most existing computer and network systems authenticate a user only at the initial login session. This could be a critical security weakness, especially for high-security systems because it enables an impostor to access the system resources until the initial user logs out. This situation is encountered when the logged in user takes a short break without logging out or an impostor coerces the valid user to allow access to the system. To address this security flaw, we propose a continuous authentication scheme that continuously monitors and authenticates the logged in user. Previous methods for continuous authentication primarily used hard biometric traits, specifically fingerprint and face to continuously authenticate the initial logged in user. However, the use of these biometric traits is not only inconvenient to the user, but is also not always feasible due to the user's posture in front of the sensor. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new framework for continuous user authentication that primarily uses soft biometric traits (e.g., color of user's clothing and facial skin). The proposed framework automatically registers (enrolls) soft biometric traits every time the user logs in and fuses soft biometric matching with the conventional authentication schemes, namely password and face biometric. The proposed scheme has high tolerance to the user's posture in front of the computer system. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for continuous user authentication.