March 14, 2016: Invited Speaker Seminar: On Implicit Authentication

Dr. Urs HENGARTNER

Monday, March 14, 2016 at 1:00 pm
Room EV003.309

Abstract

How often have you been annoyed about your smartphone because it asks you to enter a PIN each time you want to use it?  Maybe you have been so annoyed that you turned off authentication entirely.  Of course, you regretted this decision as soon as you caught your two-year-old kie making random phone calls from your phone.

Would it not be great if your smartphone could detect who is using it based on how the person is using the phone?  This is the idea behind implicit authentication, which uses behavioral patterns to continuously and transparently authenticate mobile device users.  Researchers have proposed various implicit authentication schemes based on, for example, people's touch-input behavior, their gait pattern, or their location or browser history.

While these schemes have been shown to have reasonable detection accuracy, many research challenges remain.  In this talk, I am going to report on our research efforts in this area, namely comparing different implicit authentication schemes, building an open-source framework for implicit authentication, and studying users' security and usability perceptions of implicit authentication.

Biography

Urs Hengartner is an Associate Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he is a founding member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group.  His research interests are in information privacy and in computer and networks security.  In particular, he aims to increase the security of emerging computing platforms, specifically mobile phones, and of their services, such as location-based or (geo) social mobile applications.  He also develops privacy-enhancing technologies for people who want to benefit from these platforms and services.  He has a degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.  In 2012 he was a visiting researcher at EPFL.  He is an area editor for the Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal and was vice technical program chair for PerCom 2014 and Provacy Track Chair for PST 2014.