SkullConduct

We store a lot of information on ourlaptops and smartphones. Many peopleprotect this information with passwordsand PINs. We need a more secure wayto protect our personal information.Computer scientists from the Universityof Saarland and the University ofStuttgart are working on one. They wantto introduce a new biometric identifier. Itwill be used with the eyewear computerGoogle Glass. The identifier usescomponents of Google Glass.

It has a miniature identifier and a boneconduction speaker. The speaker isalmost invisible and placed near theright ear. Sound vibrations are directedthrough the skull bone to the inner ear.Everyone’s skull bone is different. Sothe sound is used as a biometricidentifier. The system is named“SkullConduct.” So far, it has anaccuracy of 97 percent. You will neverlose your password again.

Secure user identification is important for the increasing number of eyewear computers but limited input capabilities pose significant usability challenges for established knowledgebased schemes, such as passwords or PINs. We present SkullConduct, a biometric system that uses bone conduction of sound through the user’s skull as well as a microphone readily integrated into many of these devices, such as Google Glass. At the core of SkullConduct is a method to analyze the characteristic frequency response created by the user’s skull using a combination of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features as well as a computationally light-weight 1NN classifier. We report on a controlled experiment with 10 participants that shows that this frequency response is personspecific and stable – even when taking off and putting on the device multiple times – and thus serves as a robust biometric. We show that our method can identify users with 97.0% accuracy and authenticate them with an equal error rate of 6.9%, thereby bringing biometric user identification to eyewear computers equipped with bone conduction technology.