Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Continuous User Authentication Based on Smartphone Sensors
Bandar Alotaibi, Munif Alotaibi · Sensors · 2025
Continuous user authentication is critical to mobile device security, addressing vulnerabilities associated with traditional one-time authentication methods. This research proposes a hybrid deep learning framework that combines techniques from computer vision and sequence modeling, namely, ViT-inspired patch extraction, multi-head attention, and BiLSTM networks, to authenticate users continuously from smartphone sensor data. Unlike many existing approaches that directly apply these techniques for specific recognition tasks, our method reshapes raw motion signals into ViT-like patches to capture short-range patterns, employs multi-head attention to emphasize the most discriminative temporal segments, and then processes these enhanced embeddings through a bidirectional LSTM to integrate broader contextual information. This integrated pipeline effectively extracts local and global motion features specific to each user's unique behavior, improving accuracy over conventional Transformer, Informer, CNN, and LSTM baselines. Experiments on the MotionSense and UCI HAR datasets show accuracies of 97.51% and 89.37%, respectively, indicating strong user-identification performance.