Design and Evaluation of accelerometer based user authentication methods

Smartphones' usages are growing rapidly. Smart phone usages are not limited to the receiving/calling or SMSing anymore. People use smartphone for online shopping, searching various information in the web, bank transactions, games, different applications for different usages etc. Anything is possible by just having a smartphone and the internet. The more usages of the smartphone also increase keeping more secrete information about the user in the phone. The popularity is increasing and so is different ways to steal/hack the phones. There are many areas which require further investigation in the field of smartphone security and authentication. This thesis work evaluates the scope of different inbuilt sensors in smartphones for mobile authentication based techniques. The Android Operating system was used in the implementation phase. Android OS has many open source library and Services which have been used for the sensor identification using Java Android platform. Two applications using Accelerometer sensor and one using Magnetometer sensor were developed. Two foremost objectives of this thesis work were-1) To figure it out the possibilities of sensor based authentication technique. 2) To check the end user perception/opinion about the applications. Usability testing was conducted to gather the user's assessments/vision of the applications. Two methods which were used for usability testing are named Magical move and Tapping. Users (Most of them) have shown interest and inclination towards tapping application. Although, some users were also expressed inhibitions using both sensor based methods.