Your Heart Won't Lie: PPG-based Continuous Authentication on Wrist-worn Wearable Devices

This paper presents a photoplethysmography (PPG)-based continuous user authentication (CA) system, which especially leverages the PPG sensors in wrist-worn wearable devices to identify users. We explore the uniqueness of the human cardiac system captured by the PPG sensing technology. Existing CA systems require either the dedicated sensing hardware or specific gestures, whereas our system does not require any users' interactions but only the wearable device, which has already been pervasively equipped with PPG sensors. Notably, we design a robust motion artifacts (MA) removal method to mitigate the impact of MA from wrist movements. Additionally, we explore the characteristic fiducial features from PPG measurements to efficiently distinguish the human cardiac system. Furthermore, we develop a cardiac-based classifier for user identification using the Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT). Experiments with the prototype of the wrist-worn PPG sensing platform and 10 participants in different scenarios demonstrate that our system can effectively remove MA and achieve a high average authentication success rate over 90%.