You Think, Therefore You Are: Transparent Authentication System with Brainwave-Oriented Bio-Features for IoT Networks

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an evolutionary paradigm seamlessly integrating an enormous number of smart objects within the Internet. Recently, with the rapid growth and universality of wearable technology, novel security threats are emerging at the system level as well as at edge nodes in IoT-based networks. In this study, we envision a future IoT scenario in which end-users are with smart wearable objects related to human brainwave retrieval. A novel transparent authentication system using brainwaves as bio-features for IoT-based networks is proposed. In brief, this study first provides a comprehensive review of transparent authentication in recent years and presents the state of the art of this important research field. Second, we investigate the feasibility of extracting long-term memory ability from users’ brainwaves. Third, we conduct the bio-features identified in the brainwaves of users as authentication tokens in the proposed authentication system which transparently performs continuous (or real-time) entity verification in the background without the need for direct input from the user. Experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed authentication system in achieving high verification accuracy.