Exploiting Eye Tracking for Smartphone Authentication

Traditional user authentication methods using passcode or finger movement on smartphones are vulnerable to shoulder surfing attack, smudge attack, and keylogger attack. These attacks are able to infer a passcode based on the information collection of user’s finger movement or tapping input. As an alternative user authentication approach, eye tracking can reduce the risk of suffering those attacks effectively because no hand input is required. However, most existing eye tracking techniques are designed for large screen devices. Many of them depend on special hardware like high resolution eye tracker and special process like calibration, which are not readily available for smartphone users. In this paper, we propose a new eye tracking method for user authentication on a smartphone. It utilizes the smartphone’s front camera to capture a user’s eye movement trajectories which are used as the input of user authentication. No special hardware or calibration process is needed. We develop a prototype and evaluate its effectiveness on an Android smartphone. We recruit a group of volunteers to participate in the user study. Our evaluation results show that the proposed eye tracking technique achieves very high accuracy in user authentication.