HeartPrint: Exploring a Heartbeat-Based Multiuser Authentication With Single mmWave Radar

Abstract

Continuous authentication is crucial for protecting user’s privacy throughout their login session. Existing studies employ wireless sensing technologies to provide device-free and unobtrusive authentication; the user’s behavior is continually assessed without their direct involvement until it deviates from their normal pattern. However, these works primarily concentrate on single-user authentication, which poses challenges in multiuser scenarios, such as smart homes and offices, where more than one user usually exists. In this article, we propose HeartPrint, a continuous multiuser authentication system, that employs a single commodity mmWave radar to capture the unique self-driving heartbeat motions from multiple users. Specifically, HeartPrint leverages the effect of skin surface vibrations caused by heartbeat on radio frequency (RF) transmissions. To profile individual heartbeat signals from the entangled components that are induced by multiple users, we first use a clustering method to position each user in the environment, then focus on the signal reflected from each position separately. The irrelevant body movements are eliminated from the RF signal by using a proposed signal energy comparison method for preserving fine-grained heartbeat traits. We then develop a pipeline to extract the most informative features for characterizing each user and feed them to an elaborated classifier for user authentication. We evaluate HeartPrint with 54 participants and demonstrate that it achieves an average authentication accuracy of over 95%. Additionally, we show that it is resilient against spoofing attacks, with an average attack success rate of less than 3%.