Smartphone-based Biometric Authentication Scheme for Access Control Management in Client-server Environment

Abstract

As the information put together by the blend of smartphones, the cloud, the IOT, and ubiquitous computing continue to expand at an alarming rate, a data breach increases. Today, users' strong authentication and authorization approaches are increasingly important to secure sensitive, confidential, secret information. Possession and knowledge-based authentication techniques for computers, the internet, email accounts, etc., are commonly used to access vital information; they do not link a user to an established identity, resulting in most security vulnerabilities. Biometric authentication, on the other hand, has the privilege of being more reliable than traditional authentication as biometric characteristics of a person can’t be lost; they are tough to distribute, exchange or duplicate; and it requires the user to be present during the authentication process, thereby relating the users to established identities. Biometrics provides a higher level of assurance that the individual attempting to ascertain is the individual in question. Thus, resulting in a more reliable, usable, and cost-effective model with a higher level of protection to deter an attacker from obtaining entry to a computer or network and gaining access to confidential data. This paper introduces a novel fingerprint-based authentication scheme for mobile environments, enabling user authentication based on fingerprint features using a challenge-response-based authentication process. In this study, the proposed authentication system has been developed on a real Android-based smartphone, tested on actual users, and performance analysis has been carried out; empirical results reveal that the proposed authentication scheme achieves increased performance. Moreover, a usability analysis has been done to determine efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. The evaluation results indicate its feasibility to use it as an effective authentication mechanism for mobile phone environments.