Shakespeer: Verifying the Co-presence of Smart Devices and Users via Vibration

Securely and unobtrusively authenticating a user is an important problem given the pervasiveness of smartphones. Existing approaches, such as password, fingerprints, or facial recognition, are vulnerable to various attacks, and/or degrade usability. To overcome this problem, we propose Shakespeer, which differentiates users based on uniqueness in the propagation of haptic vibrations through hand, forearm muscles and bones. These vibrations are generated by the user’s smartphone and sensed by their smartphone and smartwatch. The unobtrusive haptic vibrational response makes this biometric feature hard to be replicated. Meanwhile, it provides the co-presence detection function, which allows the devices to confirm the co-presence on the user’s body. We implement Shakespeer using smartphones and smartwatches and tested it across 32 subjects under real-world settings. From our preliminary exploratory evaluation, Shakespeer achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 0.59 %, demonstrating its feasibility.