Continuous User Authentication by Contactless Wireless Sensing

This paper presents BodyPIN, which is a continuous user authentication system by contactless wireless sensing using commodity Wi-Fi. BodyPIN can track the current user’s legal identity throughout a computer system’s execution. In case the authentication fails, the consequent accesses will be denied to protect the system. The recent rich wireless-based user identification designs cannot be applied to BodyPIN directly, because they identify a user’s various activities, rather than the user herself. The enforced to be performed activities can thus interrupt the user’s operations on the system, highly inconvenient and not user-friendly. In this paper, we leverage the bio-electromagnetics domain human model for quantifying the impact of human body on the bypassing Wi-Fi signals and deriving the component that indicates a user’s identity. Then, we extract suitable Wi-Fi signal features to fully represent such an identity component, based on which we fulfill the continuous user authentication design. We implement a BodyPIN prototype by commodity Wi-Fi NICs without any extra or dedicated wireless hardware. We show that BodyPIN achieves promising authentication performances, which is also lightweight and robust under various practical settings.