Title
POSTER: TouchTrack: How Unique are your Touch Gestures?
Abstract
This paper studies a privacy threat induced by the collection and monitoring of a user's touch gestures on touchscreen devices. The threat is a new form of persistent tracking which we refer to as "touch-based tracking". It goes beyond tracking of virtual identities and has the potential for cross-device tracking as well as identifying multiple users using the same device. To demonstrate the likelihood of touch-based tracking, we propose an information theoretic method that quantifies the amount of information revealed by individual features of gestures, samples of gestures as well as samples of gesture combinations, when modelled as feature vectors. We have also developed a purpose-built app, named "TouchTrack" that collects data from users and informs them on how unique they are when interacting with their touch devices. Our results from 89 different users indicate that writing samples and left swipes can reveal 73.7% and 68.6% of user information, respectively. Combining different combinations of gestures results in higher uniqueness, with the combination of keystrokes, swipes and writing revealing up to 98.5% of information about users. We correctly re-identify returning users with a success rate of more than 90%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3133956.3138850
CCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Touch-based Tracking, Mobile Privacy, Behavioural Biometrics, Touch Gestures
Mobile privacy,Internet privacy,Feature vector,Computer science,Gesture,Touchscreen,User information,Multimedia
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4946-8
1
0.35
References 
Authors
2
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rahat Masood1407.94
Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao2105.06
Hassan Jameel318514.90
Moahmed Ali Kâafar410.35