High Accuracy and Presentation Attack Resistant Hand Authentication via Acoustic Sensing for Commodity Mobile Devices
Cong Wu, Kun He, Jing Chen, Ruiying Du, Ran Yan, Ziming Zhao · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2025
Biometric authentication schemes, i.e., fingerprint and face authentication, raise serious privacy concerns. To alleviate such concerns, hand authentication has been proposed recently. Existing hand authentication schemes, however, use dedicated hardware, such as infrared or depth cameras, which are not available on commodity mobile devices. In this paper, we presentEchoHand, a high accuracy and presentation attack resistant authentication scheme that complements camera-based 2-dimensional hand geometry recognition of one hand with an active acoustic sensing of the other hand. To this end,EchoHandplays an inaudible acoustic signal using the speaker to actively sense the holding hand and collects the echoes using the microphone.EchoHanddoes not rely on any specialized hardware but uses the built-in speaker, microphone and camera.EchoHanddoes not place more burdens on users than existing hand authentication methods. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the reliability, security, and usability ofEchoHand. The results show thatEchoHandhas a low equal error rate of 2.45% with as few as 10 training data points and it defeats presentation attacks. The results of the user study also suggest that the required hand gestures are easy to perform, andEchoHandis very user-friendly with low latency.