Transparent Handwriting Verification for Mobile Devices

The popularity of mobile devices and the evolving nature of the services and information they can delivery make them increasingly desirable targets for misuse. The ability to provide effective authentication of the user becomes imperative if protection against misuse of personally and financially sensitive information is to be provided. Traditional measures, such as the PIN, although commensurate with current technology requirements, do not provide the level of security required for third generation mobile devices and beyond. Biometrics do however, when implemented intelligently, offer an alternative and more secure approach. This paper discusses the application of biometrics to a mobile device in a transparent and continuous fashion and the subsequent advantages and disadvantages that are in contention with various biometric techniques. For example, in order to facilitate the use of signature recognition transparently, the system must verify users based upon written words and not signatures. From the experiment conducted it was found that current signature recognition systems could indeed perform successful authentication on written words. Based upon 20 participants an average FAR and FRR of 0% and 1.2% respectively were experienced across 8 common words.