Two-Factor Authentication Based on Acoustic Fingerprinting in Modulation Domain

Yanzhi Ren, Tingyuan Yang, Yufei Zhou, Hongbo Liu, Jiadi Yu, Haomiao Yang, Hongwei Li

Abstract: The two-factor authentication (2FA) has been increasingly used with the popularity of mobile devices. Currently, many existing 2FA schemes extract the devices’ acoustic fingerprints as the second factor. Nevertheless, they mainly consider deriving fingerprints from the raw acoustic waveforms for authentication, which are susceptible to the fingerprint variations caused by the environmental noise or the varying distance between devices. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a robust system utilizing the distortions of modulated signals, which are incurred by the acoustic elements of mobile devices, as the proof for 2FA. Specifically, our system first designs a channel delay estimation scheme to accurately estimate the propagation delay from the speaker to the microphone by deriving the phase change of the received sinusoidal signal. To perform a robust authentication, we design a new acoustic fingerprinting scheme to remove the impacts of the varying distance and environmental noise from the demodulated PSK signals for fingerprint extraction. Moreover, our device authentication component designs a transfer learning-based scheme to capture the subtle differences in devices’ fingerprints for accurate device authentication. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first 2FA system that could extract acoustic fingerprints in modulation domain and can effectively withstand the impacts of channel distortions. We also confirm the accuracy and security of our system through extensive user experiments.