Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions

The study aims to understand and quantify the privacy threat landscape of touch-based biometrics. Touch interactions from mobile devices are ubiquitous and do not require additional permissions to collect. Two privacy threats were examined - user tracking and personal information leakage. First, we...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Georgiev, M, Eberz, S, Martinovic, I
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2022
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author Georgiev, M
Eberz, S
Martinovic, I
author_facet Georgiev, M
Eberz, S
Martinovic, I
author_sort Georgiev, M
collection OXFORD
description The study aims to understand and quantify the privacy threat landscape of touch-based biometrics. Touch interactions from mobile devices are ubiquitous and do not require additional permissions to collect. Two privacy threats were examined - user tracking and personal information leakage. First, we designed a practical fingerprinting simulation experiment and executed it on a large publicly available touch interactions dataset. We found that touch-based strokes can be used to fingerprint users with high accuracy and performance can be further increased by adding only a single extra feature. The system can distinguish between new and returning users with up to 75% accuracy and match a new session to the user it originated from with up to 74% accuracy. In the second part of the study, we investigated the possibility of predicting personal information attributes through the use of touch interaction behavior. The attributes we investigated were age, gender, dominant hand, country of origin, height, and weight. We found that our model can predict the age group and gender of users with up to 66% and 62% accuracy respectively. Finally, we discuss countermeasures, limitations and provide suggestions for future work in the field.
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spelling oxford-uuid:91921274-25e5-4112-b65c-6bb1f9d6a2172022-11-08T11:13:08ZFingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactionsConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:91921274-25e5-4112-b65c-6bb1f9d6a217EnglishSymplectic ElementsAssociation for Computing Machinery2022Georgiev, MEberz, SMartinovic, IThe study aims to understand and quantify the privacy threat landscape of touch-based biometrics. Touch interactions from mobile devices are ubiquitous and do not require additional permissions to collect. Two privacy threats were examined - user tracking and personal information leakage. First, we designed a practical fingerprinting simulation experiment and executed it on a large publicly available touch interactions dataset. We found that touch-based strokes can be used to fingerprint users with high accuracy and performance can be further increased by adding only a single extra feature. The system can distinguish between new and returning users with up to 75% accuracy and match a new session to the user it originated from with up to 74% accuracy. In the second part of the study, we investigated the possibility of predicting personal information attributes through the use of touch interaction behavior. The attributes we investigated were age, gender, dominant hand, country of origin, height, and weight. We found that our model can predict the age group and gender of users with up to 66% and 62% accuracy respectively. Finally, we discuss countermeasures, limitations and provide suggestions for future work in the field.
spellingShingle Georgiev, M
Eberz, S
Martinovic, I
Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title_full Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title_fullStr Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title_full_unstemmed Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title_short Fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
title_sort fingerprinting and personal information leakage from touchscreen interactions
work_keys_str_mv AT georgievm fingerprintingandpersonalinformationleakagefromtouchscreeninteractions
AT eberzs fingerprintingandpersonalinformationleakagefromtouchscreeninteractions
AT martinovici fingerprintingandpersonalinformationleakagefromtouchscreeninteractions