• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.135-141
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• 2011

Recent advances in mobile devices and development of various mobile applications dealing with private information of users made user authentication in mobile devices a very important issue. This paper presents a new user authentication method based on touch screen interfaces. This method uses for authentication the PIN digits as well as the exact locations the user touches to input these digits. Our method is fully compatible with the regular PIN entry method which uses numeric keypads, and it provides better usability than the behavioral biometric schemes because its PIN registration process is much simpler. According to our experiments, our method guarantees EERs of 12.8%, 8.3%, and 9.3% for 4-digit PINs, 6-digit PINs, and 11-digit cell phone numbers, respectively, under the extremely conservative assumption that all users have the same PIN digits and cell phone numbers. Thus we can guarantee much higher performance in identification functionality by applying this result to a more practical situation where every user uses distinct PIN and sell phone number. Finally, our method is far more secure than the regular PIN entry method, which is verified by our experiments where attackers are required to recover a PIN after observing the PIN entry processes of the regular PIN and our method under the same level of security parameters.