LatentSense security learns how you touch your phone

How can you improve the security of your smartphone beyond that of a regular old password, swipe gesture, and even the occasional fingerprint scanner?

How about having your phone recognize your specific touch behavior, and shutting down when anyone who isn’t you, tries to use it?

That’s what a team of researchers at Georgia Tech who specialize in cybersecurity have accomplished with LatentSense.

The tech learns and adapts to your way of interacting with your phone, learning your specific “touch signature”. This is comprised of the unique ways you tap, touch, and swipe on your phone. The team has allowed for up to five separate profiles for anyone else you trust to use your device.

Anyone else who grabs hold of your phone and manages to bypass your password will have to mimic your cell phone touch behaviors in order to continuously use your phone. Otherwise, the phone locks down and becomes inoperable.

Polo Chou, assistant professor from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing had this to say of the technology:

“The system learns a person’s ‘touch signature,’ then constantly compares it to how the current user is interacting with the device,” 

The Georgia Tech team who’ve developed LatentSense says that it is 97% accurate (they tested it on Android devices.) The software also runs in the background of your phone’s processes, and there really isn’t a way to know whether it’s been enabled or not, so someone who picks up your phone would have to know how to disable it to get access to your stuff. By the time they tap and swipe through menus to turn it off, however, they may be locked out of your phone.

Would anyone want to see a demo of this in action or try it out for themselves?

Source | Via