SmartEar: Rhythm-Based Tap Authentication Using Earphone in Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Network

The rapid development of the information-centric wireless sensor network (ICWSN) has solved the challenges of information transmission and processing caused by the accelerated growth of wearable devices and the wide deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) recently. The privacy security is also a growing problem. The existing works use earphones, covert, and user-friendly wearable devices, for user authentication. However, some of the earphone-based authentication solutions need to customize special earphones, which are not universal. Other solutions use microphones and speakers of earphones for authentication, which are susceptible to changes in the auricle’s internal environment, resulting in a decline in performance. To solve this problem, a new authentication solution based on the existing commercial earphones is proposed to authenticate a user by tapping on the earphone rhythmically. This rhythmic tap behavior causes a change of the signal waveform of the built-in accelerometer in the earphone. Based on this, we design a pipeline to authenticate the user’s identity. We first design an event detection algorithm to segment the tap signal accurately. Then, we use the global features calculated based on the event detection algorithm and local features extracted from the convolutional neural network (CNN) for building an authentication model using the Naive Bayes (NB) classifier. Finally, 20 users are recruited to evaluate the experiment and the recognition accuracy reaches 98%. Moreover, we extend the experiment to prove that it has a good performance against the different attacks and is robust in different scenarios.