Continuous authentication using biometrics: An advanced review

Abstract The shortcomings of conventional access control systems for high‐security environments have led to the concert of continuous authentication. Contrary to traditional verification, in which users are authenticated only once at the start of their session, continuous authentication systems regularly check users' identities to prevent hijackings. The challenges in this area involve balancing the security of protected assets by quickly detecting intruders with the system usability for genuine users. Biometric recognition plays a major role within this context, as it is the main way to assure that users are who they claim to be. A comparative analysis of the latest works revealed different aspects of this problem. First, some biometrics traits among those applied for continuous authentication are more suitable for this task than others. Second, systems combining multiple traits have advantages over those relying on a single one. Finally, many works fail to report proper evaluation metrics. With this in mind, we were able to identify new opportunities for researchers in the field. We highlight the potential for mining new datasets on the internet, which would benefit validation and benchmarking, and how recent deep learning techniques could address some of the open challenges in the area. This article is categorized under: Technologies > Prediction Technologies > Machine Learning Application Areas > Science and Technology