Mobile Biometrics: Towards A Comprehensive Evaluation Methodology

Smartphones have become the pervasive personal computing platform. Recent years thus have witnessed exponential growth in research and development for secure and usable authentication schemes for smartphones. Several explicit (e.g., PIN-based) and/or implicit (e.g., biometrics-based) authentication methods have been designed and published in the literature. In fact, some of them have been embedded in commercial mobile products as well. However, the published studies report only the brighter side of the proposed scheme(s), e.g., higher accuracy attained by the proposed mechanism. While other associated operational issues, such as computational overhead, robustness to different environmental conditions/attacks, usability, are intentionally or unintentionally ignored. More specifically, most publicly available frameworks did not discuss or explore any other evaluation criterion, usability and environment-related measures except the accuracy under zero-effort. Thus, their baseline operations usually give a false sense of progress. This paper, therefore, presents some guidelines to researchers for designing, implementation, and evaluating smartphone user authentication methods for a positive impact on future technological developments. The aim of the article is making sure that the published methods and results in the literature have been analyzed properly, thereby leading to higher quality products, impactful methods, and claims.