Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper presents experiments with the home-made, low-cost prototype of a sensor-equipped pen for handwriting-based biometric authentication. The pen allows to capture the dynamics of user writing on normal paper, while producing a kind of password (passphrase) chosen in advance. The use of a word of any length instead of the user's signature makes the approach more robust to spoofing, since there is no repetitive pattern to steal. Moreover, if the template gets violated, this is much less harmful than signature catch.

Mobile biometrics represent the new frontier of authentication. The most appealing feature of mobile devices is the wide availability and the presence of more and more reliable sensors for capturing biometric traits, e.g., cameras and accelerometers. Moreover, they more and more often store personal and sensitive data, that need to be protected. Doing this on the same device using biometrics to enforce security seems a natural solution. This makes this research topic attracting and generally promising.