January 16, 2022

Paper accepted to WristSense 2022

Our paper entitled “Inferring user height and improving impersonation attacks in mobile payments using a smartwatch” (Jack Sturgess, Simon Eberz, Ivo Sluganovic, Ivan Martinovic) has been accepted to WristSense 2022: Workshop on Sensing Systems and Applications Using Wrist Worn Smart Devices, which is co-located with IEEE PerCom and takes place in Pisa, Italy, from 21-25 March.

Abstract

In this paper, we show that as a user makes mobile payments with a smartwatch, the height of the user can be inferred purely from inertial sensor data captured on the watch (with R2 scores of up to 0.77). Besides unwanted information exposure, we also show that users of a similar height are more difficult to distinguish between in terms of their tap gesture data and that an attacker who chooses a victim of a similar height can improve the success chance of impersonation (by increasing the false acceptance rate by up to 20.6%).