TIPS: context-aware implicit user identification using touch screen in uncontrolled environments

Due to the dramatical increase in popularity of mobile devices in the last decade, more sensitive user information is stored and accessed on these devices everyday. However, most existing technologies for user authentication only cover the login stage or only work in restricted controlled environments or GUIs in the post login stage. In this work, we present TIPS, a Touch based Identity Protection Service that implicitly and unobtrusively authenticates users in the background by continuously analyzing touch screen gestures in the context of a running application. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate contextual app information to improve user authentication. We evaluate TIPS over data collected from 23 phone owners and deployed it to 13 of them with 100 guest users. TIPS can achieve over 90% accuracy in real-life naturalistic conditions within a small amount of computational overhead and 6% of battery usage.