Smartphone based user verification leveraging gait recognition for mobile healthcare systems

The rapid deployment of sensing technology in smartphones and the explosion of their usage in people's daily lives provide users with the ability to collectively sense the world. This leads to a growing trend of mobile healthcare systems utilizing sensing data collected from smartphones with/without additional external sensors to analyze and understand people's physical and mental states. However, such healthcare systems are vulnerable to user spoofing attacks, in which an adversary distributes his registered device to other users such that data collected from these users can be claimed as his own to obtain more healthcare benefits and undermine the successful operation of mobile healthcare systems. Existing mitigation approaches either only rely on a secret PIN number (which can not deal with colluded attacks) or require an explicit user action for verification. In this paper, we propose a user verification scheme leveraging unique gait patterns derived from acceleration readings in mobile healthcare systems to detect possible user spoofing attacks. Our framework exploits the readily available accelerometers embedded within smartphones for user verification. Specifically, our user spoofing attack mitigation scheme (which consists of three components, namely Step Cycle Identification, Step Cycle Interpolation, and Similarity Score Computation) is used to extract gait patterns from run-time accelerometer measurements to perform robust user verification under various walking speeds. Our experiments using 322 smartphone-based traces over a period of 6 months confirm that our scheme is highly effective for detecting user spoofing attacks. This strongly indicates the feasibility of using smartphone based low grade accelerometer to conduct gait recognition and facilitate effective user verification without active user cooperation.