Quick-pass Continuous Authentication with Real-time Biometrics Extraction on COTS Earphones Using Out-ear Microphones

Continuous authentication is increasingly critical for cyber security. However, existing approaches are time-consuming due to their simplistic signal modulation and low efficiency in feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a continuous authentication technique, OnePiece. OnePiece is free from the requirement of in-ear microphones, which are necessary for existing earphone authentication systems. It exploits out-ear microphones for biometrics extraction, which are ubiquitous on off-the-shelf earphones. We analyze the acoustic response model of ears towards out-ear microphones via the air, which is different from that towards in-ear microphones. A frequency-varying ultrasonic modulation scheme is proposed to characterize in-depth ear biometrics in user-friendly, error-free, and time-efficient ways. Therefore, OnePiece enables quick-pass authentication once users wear the earphones, followed by continuous authentication covering the whole course. Moreover, we propose a wake-up mechanism to reduce the consumed power, which addresses the key power consumption issue in ultrasonic sensing techniques. Particularly, OnePiece can be smoothly deployed on off-the-shelf wired and wireless earphones. It performs good cross-device performance in which users just register only once. Extensive evaluations are conducted to validate its effectiveness under real-world scenarios.