EarPrint: Earphone-Based Implicit User Authentication With Behavioural and Physiological Acoustics

With the increasing pervasiveness of smart earphones, it is appealing to propose more unobtrusive and convenient wearable authentication methods. Researchers have designed earphone-based authentication systems which utilize high-frequency audio signals to scan ear canal structure.Nevertheless, they possess shortcomings of low unobtrusiveness and robustness.In this paper, we put forward an earphone-based passive authentication system which makes use of physiological and behavioural acoustic signals caused by a user’s natural actions including putting on earphones and inner organs’ activities, respectively.By introducing attention mechanism into the network design, our method adaptively weighs two channel signals, and extracts stable‘fingerprints’ for different people, which relieves model retraining for unseen users and improves its scalability.We have built a real-time prototype called EarPrint by designing the earphones and a mobile application, and conducted comprehensive experiments under diverse settings.Experimental results demonstrate that EarPrint has low false acceptance rate (FAR) and equal error rate (EER) less than 1% and 5% in most cases, respectively.