Gait-Based Privacy Protection for Smart Wearable Devices

Smart wearable devices (SWDs) collect and store sensitive daily information of many people. Its primary method of identification is still the password unlocking method. However, several studies have shown serious security flaws in that method, which makes the privacy and security concerns of SWDs particularly urgent. Gait identification is well suited for SWDs because its built-in sensors can provide data support for identification. However, existing gait identification methods have low accuracy and neglect to protect the privacy of gait features. In addition, the SWD can be used as an Internet of Things device for users to share data. But few studies have used gait feature-based encryption schemes to protect the privacy of message interactions between SWDs and other devices. In this article, we propose a gait identification network, a bidirectional long short-term memory network with an attention mechanism (ABLSTM), to improve the identification accuracy and a stochastic orthogonal transformation (SOT) scheme to protect the extracted gait features from leakage. In the experiments, ABLSTM achieves an accuracy of 95.28%, reducing previous error rate by 19.3%. The SOT scheme is proved to be resistant to the chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) and is 30% faster than previous methods. A biometric-based encryption scheme is proposed to enable secure message interactions using gait features as keys after the gait identification stage is passed, and offers better protection of the gait features compared to previous schemes.