Performance analysis of physical signature authentication

In signature authentication schemes, a candidate signature presented for authentication is compared to a previous signature measurement. Uniqueness of a signature is a result of a random physical process underlying the signature formation. In this paper, we model signatures as realizations of random processes with known statistics. Rate functions for the false alarm and miss probabilities are determined. The case where the candidate signature and previous signature measurement are zero-mean, stationary, and Gaussian is covered in detail, yielding quantitative measures of performance for system design. The binary case is also discussed. Index Terms – Signature authentication, detection theory, large deviations, Toeplitz matrices.