Cardiocam: Leveraging camera on mobile devices to verify users while their heart is pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%.