Push It Real Good: Towards Behavioral Access Control using the Door Handle Push-Down-Phase Only

Identifying persons based on their interaction with a door handle has been an active research field in the past years and related work presented promising results. In this context, they instrumented door handles with sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, or touch and extracted features from complete opening interactions that include pushing down the handle, opening the door, entering the room, and releasing the handle. This work extends existing research with an evaluation whether already the initial door handle’s push-down-phase (PDP) provides sufficient data for behavior-based authentication. For that, recorDOOR was built, a door handle prototype equipped with a camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, four touch stripes, and three ultrasonic distance sensors. We recorded 768 door interactions from eight participants (48 per hand) using recorDOOR, manually labeled the PDP’s start and end, and when the door started moving using our camera stream. We are the first that recorded both hands and also simulated four real-life door opening scenarios including a novel opening careful scenario when standing in front of a door. Our quantitative analysis of the extracted PDPs shows that there is a high variance between PDP durations from less than 40 milliseconds to more than a second and that there are notable differences between left and right hand while opening independent of the scenario. Furthermore, over 95% of our participants started moving the door before the handle was pushed down to its maximum that further shortens the time for a user identification. Based on 235 extracted features and nested 5-fold cross-validation, a Gradient Boosting Classifier performed best and achieved a mean accuracy of 87.92% in an identification scenario for the overall PDP and 82.41% if only considering the PDP before the door is already moved.