On humanoid robots imitating human touch gestures on the smart phone

Abstract

We showcase an attack in which an autonomous humanoid robot is trained to execute touch gestures that match those of a target user. Different from past work which addressed a similar problem using a Lego robot, we harness the significant processing power and unique motoric capabilities of the autonomous humanoid robot to implement an attack that: (1) executes touch gestures with high precision, (2) is easily adapted to execute gestures on different touch screen devices, and (3) requires minimal human involvement. Relative to the traditional zero-effort impostor attacks, we show, based on a dataset of 26 users, that our attack significantly degrades the performance of touch-based authentication systems. In addition to the paper highlighting the threat that sophisticated adversaries pose to touch-based authentication systems, our robotic attack design provides a blueprint for much needed impostor testing mechanisms that simulate algorithmic (or sophisticated) adversaries against touch-based authentication systems.