[Colloquium] Zhuolin Yang MS Presentation/Dec 6, 2021

[meganwoodward at uchicago.edu]

This is an announcement of Zhuolin Yang's MS Presentation
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Candidate: Zhuolin Yang

Date: Monday, December 06, 2021

Time: 11 am CST

Remote Location: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/91034546139?pwd=N2FTdFVWRStacTVPbEJMR21DZG1iZz09

Location: JCL 298

M.S. Paper Title: User Authentication via Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Abstract: We propose a novel modality for active biometric authentication: electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). To authenticate a user, EMS stimulates the user’s forearm muscles with a sequence of electrical impulses (i.e., EMS challenge) and the user’s involuntary finger movements (i.e., response to the challenge) serve as the biometric data for verification. This new biometric modality is enabled by EMS’s intersubject variability, where the same electrical stimulation results in different movements in different users because everybody is physiologically unique. 
 
We engineered an interactive system, which we call ElectricAuth, to explore the feasibility of EMS based authentication. Due to its challenge-response design, it secure against data breaches and replay attacks, a major vulnerability facing today’s biometrics such as facial recognition and fingerprints. In our user studies, we confirmed that ElectricAuth resists: (1) impersonation attacks, (2) replay attacks and, (3) synthesis attacks. Our longitudinal study also shows that ElectricAuth produces consistent results over time.

Advisors: Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng

Committee Members: Ben Zhao, Heather Zheng, and Pedro Lopes