BeeHIVE: Behavioral Biometric System based on Object Interactions in Smart Environments

The lack of standard input interfaces in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems presents a challenge in securing such infrastructures. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel behavioral biometric system based on naturally occurring interactions with objects in smart environments. This biometric leverages existing sensors to authenticate users without requiring any hardware modifications of existing smart home devices. The system is designed to reduce the need for phone-based authentication mechanisms, on which smart home systems currently rely. It requires the user to approve transactions on their phone only when the user cannot be authenticated with high confidence through their interactions with the smart environment. We conduct a real-world experiment that involves 13 participants in a company environment, using this experiment to also study mimicry attacks on our proposed system. We show that this system can provide seamless and unobtrusive authentication while still staying highly resistant to zero-effort, video, and in-person observation-based mimicry attacks. Even when at most 1% of the strongest type of mimicry attacks are successful, our system does not require the user to take out their phone to approve legitimate transactions in more than 80% of cases for a single interaction. This increases to 92% of transactions when interactions with more objects are considered.