Lightweight and Secure Face-based Active Authentication for Mobile Users

Abstract

Active Authentication (AA) systems continuously authenticate users on smartphones. With high quality front-facing cameras available on recent smartphones, face-based active authentication emerges as a good candidate for AA systems. On the other hand, secure authentication of mobile users is a big concern in biometric systems. Mobile match-on-card (MMOC) technique takes advantage of SIM/eSIM card as a secure element (SE) to protect biometric templates and verify users isolated from the smartphone's environment. However, resource limitations of smart cards make MMOC authentication hard to implement. In this paper, we propose two system architectures for MMOC face-based AA systems. In Cloud-assisted MMOC architecture (CA-MMOC), we use cloud resources for model selection and training. Full MMOC architecture (F-MMOC) relies only on SIM/eSIM card's resources for enrollment and verification. A quantization scheme is proposed to make the authentication system implementable on SIM cards, plus a speed-up technique to reduce on-card execution time. Using a public mobile video dataset, we evaluate the proposed system. Our evaluation results show that the proposed MMOC authentication achieves high accuracy in real-time with a small memory footprint on SIM, and is suitable for cross-platform authentication. We also implement the CA-MMOC system on a real smartphone and evaluate the system's performance overhead in terms of power consumption, CPU and memory usage.