SearchAuth: Neural Architecture Search-based Continuous Authentication Using Auto Augmentation Search

Mobile devices have been playing significant roles in our daily lives, which has made device security and privacy protection extremely important. These mobile devices storing user sensitive and private information, therefore, need rigorous user authentication mechanisms. In this article, we present SearchAuth, a novel continuous authentication system on smartphones exploiting a neural architecture search (NAS) to find an optimal network architecture and an auto augmentation search (AAS) to more effectively train the optimal network along with the best data augmentation policies, by leveraging the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer on smartphones to capture users’ behavioral patterns. Specifically, SearchAuth consists of three stages, i.e., the offline stage, registration stage, and authentication stage. In the offline stage, we utilize the NAS on sensor data of the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to find an optimal network architecture based on the designed search space. With the optimal network architecture, namely, NAS-based model, the AAS automatically optimizes the augmentation of the input data for more effectively training the model that is for feature extraction. In the registration stage, we use the trained NAS-based model to learn and extract deep features from the legitimate user’s data, and train the LOF classifier with 55 features selected by the PCA. In the authentication stage, with the well-trained NAS-based model and LOF classifier, SearchAuth identifies the current user as a legitimate user or an impostor when the user starts operating a smartphone. Based on our dataset, we evaluate the performance of the proposed SearchAuth, and the experimental results demonstrate that SearchAuth surpasses the representative authentication schemes by achieving the best accuracy of 93.95%, F1-score of 94.30%, and EER of 5.30% on the LOF classifier with dataset size of 100.