A data reduction scheme for active authentication of legitimate smartphone owner using informative apps ranking

Smartphones are vulnerable to fraudulent use despite having strong authentication mechanisms. Active authentication based on behavioral biometrics is a solution to protect the privacy of data in smart devices. Machine-learning-based frameworks are effective for active authentication. However, the success of any machine-learning-based techniques depends highly on the relevancy of the data in hand for training. In addition, the training time should be very efficient. Keeping in view both issues, we've explored a novel fraudulent user detection method based solely on the app usage patterns of legitimate users. We hypothesized that every user has a unique pattern hidden in his/her usage of apps. Motivated by this observation, we've designed a way to obtain training data, which can be used by any machine learning model for effective authentication. To achieve better accuracy with reduced training time, we removed data instances related to any specific user from the training samples which did not contain any apps from the user-specific priority list. An information theoretic app ranking scheme was used to prepare a user-targeted apps priority list. Predictability of each instance related to a candidate app was calculated by using a knockout approach. Finally, a weighted rank was calculated for each app specific to every user. Instances with low ranked apps were removed to derive the reduced training set. Two datasets as well as seven classifiers for experimentation revealed that our reduced training data significantly lowered the prediction error rates in the context of classifying the legitimate user of a smartphone.