What is it about?

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are computing devices that have access to the Internet. Some common examples include smartphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart televisions. While these devices provide great convenience to our everyday life, the absence of a reliable user authentication system can lead to gateways for malicious users compromising one’s cyber-physical space. As opposed to traditional knowledge-based user authentication systems, such as Postal Index Numbers (PINs), passwords, and pattern locks that come with heavy user burden, biometric-based authentication systems have become a popular solution to verify IoT device users. However, determining when to use what types of biometric authentication methods remains challenging. This paper aims to help future researchers address this challenge by compiling the classic implementations, limitations, and applications of 11 promising biometric authentication methods.

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Why is it important?

Over the past few decades, numerous works related to the Internet of Things (IoT) have been published in various application areas, including healthcare. Many of these works have focused on tracking well-being and sleep quality, monitoring health and stress, enhancing mental health, and discovering places of interest. Though these works have provided great value in the modern world, few have investigated how to protect the data collected by these studies using IoT devices. While not all collected data e.g., respiration and sleeping patterns seem to pose a risk to privacy or property, they are often collected by constantly recording or monitoring the user’s daily life, and thereby, can accidentally record confidential information, such as passwords and banking information. Biometric-based authentication not only relieves the user burden from traditional knowledge-based authentication but also allows the user to authenticate using the same data collected for other purposes, such as health monitoring. This work bridges previous security studies and emerging IoT.

Perspectives

When I see people who are unwilling to set up passwords or any authentication system on their smartphones or smartwatches, it often concerns me that their confidential information may be leaked. As a user of multiple IoT devices, I have come to realize that the root cause of this phenomenon is the tedious task of entering and remembering different passwords. Additionally, some people underestimate the amount of data collected by these IoT devices. Although this is my first publication and there is still a lot of room for improvement, I genuinely hope that this manuscript can assist future researchers in discovering better methods of securing users' cyber-physical space through IoT devices.

Chi-Wei Lien
Purdue University

While we are getting numerous benefits due to rapidly increasing IoT connectivity and smart sensing technologies, ranging from smartphones to smart rings, security and privacy of such interconnected systems remains a big challenge. Therefore, as a director of the mobile artificial intelligence (mAI) lab, I feel this manuscript presents new opportunities for researchers and tech industries while discussing the shortcomings of biometric-based authentications in the age of IoT.

Prof. Sudip Vhaduri

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Challenges and Opportunities of Biometric User Authentication in the Age of IoT: A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, June 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3603705.
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