Toward Open-World-Aware User Authentication Based on Human Bodies Using mmWave Signals

User authentication is evolving with expanded applications and innovative techniques. New authentication approaches utilize RF signals to sense specific human characteristics, offering a contactless and nonintrusive solution. However, these RF signal-based methods struggle with challenges in open-world scenarios, i.e., dynamic environments, daily behaviors with unrestricted postures, and identification of unauthorized users with security threats. In this paper, we present an open-world user authentication system, OpenAuth, which leverages a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave radar to sense unrestricted human postures and behaviors for identifying individuals. First, OpenAuth utilizes a MUSIC-based neural network imaging model to eliminate environmental clutter and generate environment-independent human silhouette images. Then, the human silhouette images are normalized to consistent topological structures of human postures, ensuring robustness against unrestricted human postures. Next, fine-grained body features are extracted from these environment-independent and posture-independent human silhouette images using a metric learning model. To eliminate potential security threats that arise from unauthorized users, OpenAuth synthesizes data placeholders for enhancing unauthorized user identification. Finally, a k-NN-based authentication model is constructed to authenticate users’ identities. Experiments in real environments show that the proposed OpenAuth achieves an average authentication accuracy of 93.4% and false acceptance rate (FAR) of 1.8% in open-world scenarios.