OpenSesame: Unlocking smart phone through handshaking biometrics

Abstract

Screen locking/unlocking is important for modern smart phones to avoid the unintentional operations and secure the personal stuff. Once the phone is locked, the user should take a specific action or provide some secret information to unlock the phone. Existing approaches do not support smart phones well due to the deficiency of security, high cost, and poor usability. We collect 200 users' handshaking actions with their smart phones and discover an appealing observation: the shaking pattern of a person is kind of unique, stable and distinguishable. In this paper, we propose OpenSesame, which employs the users' shaking patterns for locking/unlocking. The key feature of our system lies in using four fine-grained and statistic features of handshaking to verify users. Moreover, we utilize support vector machine (SVM) for accurate classification. Results from comprehensive experiments show that our technique is robust compatible across different brands of smart phones, without the need of any specialized hardware.