Biblio

For over 50 years, the password has been a frequently used, yet relatively ineffective security mechanism for user authentication. The ubiquitous smartphone is a compact suite of sensors, computation, and network connectivity that corporations are beginning to embrace under BYOD (bring your own device). In this paper, we hypothesize that each of us has a unique “walking signature” that a smartphone can recognize and use to provide passive, continuous authentication. This paper describes the exploratory data analysis of a small, cross-sectional, empirical study of users' walking signatures as observed by a smartphone. We then describe an identity management system that could use a walking signature as a means to passively and continuously authenticate a user and manage complex passwords to improve security.