Template Protected Authentication based on Location History and b-Bit MinHash

Abstract

Various services ranging from finance to public services are digitalized in recent years for higher efficiency and user convenience. With this service digitalization, the need for identifying and authenticating users is increasing. Amongst the user authentication methods, biometric authentication is spreading as it does not require the user to remember a password or to have a specific token. As a more convenient authentication method, research is also being conducted on unconscious authentication using smartphones’ movement history. In this paper, we propose location history-based implicit user authentication acquired through GPS-equipped mobile devices. This method enables hands-free user authentication just by having a mobile device. However, location data are sensitive information that needs to be secured from the risk of location data leakage. By using the template protection technique, location data can be transformed so that the original location data cannot be recovered while enabling authentication. However, it has a trade-off between security and accuracy and remains as a problem to be solved. This paper proposes a new location history matching method based on Modified Weighted Jaccard Coefficient. Then it extends it to template protected location history authentication by presenting a new template protection technique using b-Bit MinHash. Our experimental results show that our proposed location matching method achieves practical accuracy compared with the conventional location history matching method. Furthermore, our template-protected location authentication has comparable accuracy to unprotected matching.