VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Tianming Zhao 0001
dblp:196/5052-1
· DBLP profile ↗
27ranked-venue papers
9as first author
20since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1177-6897ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Computer networks · 18 · 8 first-author · 11 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 3 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 2 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Non-intrusive Reprogrammable Device Authentication Using Low-cost Motion Sensors in WearablesabstractThe rise of wearables such as fitness trackers and smartwatches has increased the need for strong security to protect personal data. Although two-factor authentication methods improve security, they often require additional user input, making them inconvenient. Recently, hardware flaws in accelerometers and WiFi interfaces have been leveraged to create low-effort two-factor authentication methods. However, these hardware-based device credentials are static, necessitating device replacement if the credentials are compromised. In this study, we introduce an innovative device authentication system that identifies wearables using vibration-based credentials. By utilizing built-in vibration motors and motion sensors (i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes), our system establishes a unique communication channel to capture the distinct characteristics of each device. Unlike existing methods, our vibration-based credentials are reprogrammable and user-friendly. We develop advanced data processing techniques to minimize the impact of noise, body motion artifacts, and wearing position. We design a lightweight convolutional neural network for feature extraction and device authentication, with a majority vote mechanism to improve identification robustness. Extensive experiments with five different smartwatches demonstrate that our system achieves an average precision of 98% and a recall of 94% under various attacks, demonstrating that including gyroscope data significantly improves performance across different wearing poses and watch orientations. Jerry Q. Cheng, Bofan He, Yan Wang 0003, Zixiao Wang 0005, Tianming Zhao 0001 |
ACM Trans. Internet Things | 5 |
| 2025 | Re-programmable Device Authentication Using Wearable Vibration Sensing TestbedsabstractWearable devices (e.g., fitness trackers and smartwatches) integrating sophisticated sensors are pervasively used in our daily lives these days. Recent research has demonstrated that the vibration motors and motion sensors in these devices offer a powerful sensing channel for various applications including human-computer interaction (HCI) [6, 7], health monitoring [5], and user authentication [1, 3]. However, vibration signals collected from wearable devices are highly susceptible to distortion from body motion artifacts and variations across different devices [4]. Therefore, a comprehensive and systematic sensing testbed is essential to facilitate research in vibration sensing for wearable devices across a wide range of applications. Bofan He, Jerry Q. Cheng, Yan Wang 0003, Zixiao Wang 0005, Tianming Zhao 0001 |
SEC | 5 |
| 2024 | A Parallel Gumbel-Softmax VAE Framework with Performance-Based TuningabstractTraditional training algorithms for Gumbel Softmax Variational Autoencoders (GS-VAEs) typically rely on an annealing scheme that gradually reduces the Softmax temperature τ according to a given function. This approach can lead to suboptimal results. To improve the performance, we propose a parallel framework for GS-VAEs, which embraces dual latent layers and multiple sub-models with diverse temperature strategies. Instead of relying on a fixed function for adjusting τ, our training algorithm uses loss difference as performance feedback to dynamically update each sub-model’s temperature τ, which is inspired by the need to balance exploration and exploitation in learning. By combining diversity in temperature strategies with the performance-based tuning method, our design helps prevent sub-models from becoming trapped in local optima and finds the GS-VAE model that best fits the given dataset. In experiments using four classic image datasets, our model significantly surpasses a standard GS-VAE that employs a temperature annealing scheme across multiple tasks, including data reconstruction, generalization capabilities, anomaly detection, and adversarial robustness. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/wxzg7045/Gumbel-Softmax-VAE-2024/tree/main. Fangshi Zhou, Tianming Zhao 0001, Luan Viet Nguyen, Zhongmei Yao |
ECAI | 2 |
| 2024 | RF Domain Backdoor Attack on Signal Classification via Stealthy TriggerabstractDeep learning (DL) has recently become a key technology supporting radio frequency (RF) signal classification applications. Given the heavy DL training requirement, adopting outsourced training is a practical option for RF application developers. However, the outsourcing process exposes a security vulnerability that enables a backdoor attack. While backdoor attacks have been explored in the vision domain, it is rarely explored in the RF domain. In this work, we present a stealthy backdoor attack that targets DL-based RF signal classification. To realize such an attack, we extensively explore the characteristics of the RF data in different applications, which include RF modulation classification and RF fingerprint-based device identification. Then, we design a training-based backdoor trigger generation approach with different optimization procedures for two backdoor attack scenarios (i.e., poison-label and clean-label). Extensive experiments on two RF signal classification datasets show that the attack success rate is over 99.2%, while its classification accuracy for the clean data remains high (i.e., less than a 0.6% drop compared to the clean model). The low NMSE (less than 0.091) indicates the stealthiness of the attack. Additionally, we demonstrate that our attack can bypass existing defense strategies, such as Neural Cleanse and STRIP. Zijie Tang, Tianming Zhao 0001, Tianfang Zhang, Huy Phan, Yan Wang 0003, Cong Shi 0004, Bo Yuan 0001, Yingying Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 2 |
| 2023 | Secure and Efficient Mobile DNN Using Trusted Execution EnvironmentsabstractMany mobile applications have resorted to deep neural networks (DNNs) because of their strong inference capabilities. Since both input data and DNN architectures could be sensitive, there is an increasing demand for secure DNN execution on mobile devices. Towards this end, hardware-based trusted execution environments on mobile devices (mobile TEEs), such as ARM TrustZone, have recently been exploited to execute CNN securely. However, running entire DNNs on mobile TEEs is challenging as TEEs have stringent resource and performance constraints. In this work, we develop a novel mobile TEE-based security framework that can efficiently execute the entire DNN in a resource-constrained mobile TEE with minimal inference time overhead. Specifically, we propose a progressive pruning to gradually identify and remove the redundant neurons from a DNN while maintaining a high inference accuracy. Next, we develop a memory optimization method to deallocate the memory storage of the pruned neurons utilizing the low-level programming technique. Finally, we devise a novel adaptive partitioning method that divides the pruned model into multiple partitions according to the available memory in the mobile TEE and loads the partitions into the mobile TEE separately with a minimal loading time overhead. Our experiments with various DNNs and open-source datasets demonstrate that we can achieve 2-30 times less inference time with comparable accuracy compared to existing approaches securing entire DNNs with mobile TEE. Bin Hu 0016, Yan Wang 0003, Jerry Q. Cheng, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yucheng Xie, Xiaonan Guo 0003, Yingying Chen 0001 |
AsiaCCS | 4 |
| 2023 | Stealthy Backdoor Attack on RF Signal ClassificationabstractRecently, deep learning (DL) has become one of the key technologies supporting radio frequency (RF) signal classification applications. Given the heavy DL training requirement, adopting outsourced training is a practical option for RF application developers. However, the outsourcing process exposes a security vulnerability that enables a backdoor attack. While backdoor attacks have been explored in the computer vision domain, it is rarely explored in the RF domain. In this work, we present a stealthy backdoor attack that targets DL-based RF signal classification. To realize such an attack, we extensively explore the characteristics of the RF data in different applications, which include RF modulation classification and RF fingerprint-based device identification. Particularly, we design a training-based backdoor trigger generation approach with an optimization procedure that not only accommodates dynamic application inputs but also is stealthy to RF receivers. Extensive experiments on two RF signal classification datasets show that the average attack success rate of our backdoor attack is over 99.2%, while its classification accuracy for the clean data remains high (i.e., less than a 0.6% drop compared to the clean model). Additionally, we demonstrate that our attack can bypass existing defense strategies, such as Neural Cleanse and STRIP. Tianming Zhao 0001, Zijie Tang, Tianfang Zhang, Huy Phan, Yan Wang 0003, Cong Shi 0004, Bo Yuan 0001, Yingying Chen 0001 |
ICCCN | 1 |
| 2023 | EmoLeak: Smartphone Motions Reveal EmotionsabstractEmotional state leakage attracts increasing concerns as it reveals rich sensitive information, such as intent, demo graphic, personality, and health information. Existing emotion recognition techniques rely on vision and audio data, which have limited threat due to the requirements of accessing restricted sensors (e.g., cameras and microphones). In this work, we first investigate the feasibility of detecting the emotional state of people in the vibration domain via zero-permission motion sensors. We find that when voice is being played through a smartphone's loudspeaker or ear speaker, it generates vibration signals on the smartphone surface, which encodes rich emotional information. As the smartphone is the go-to device for almost everyone nowadays, our attack based only on motion sensors raises severe concerns about emotion state leakage. We comprehensively study the relationship between vibration data and human emotion based on several publicly available emotion datasets (e.g., SAVEE, TESS). Time-frequency features and machine learning techniques are developed to determine the emotion of the victim based on speech vibrations. We evaluate our attack on both the ear speakers and loudspeakers on a diverse set of smartphones. The results demonstrate our attack can achieve a high accuracy, with around 95.3% (random guess 14.3%) accuracy for the loudspeaker setting and 60.52% (random guess 14.3%) accuracy for the ear speaker setting. Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Cong Shi 0004, Zhengkun Ye, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Yingying Chen 0001, Nitesh Saxena |
ICDCS | 4 |
| 2022 | RIBAC: Towards Robust and Imperceptible Backdoor Attack against Compact DNN
Huy Phan, Cong Shi 0004, Yi Xie 0001, Tianfang Zhang, Tianming Zhao 0001, Jian Liu 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Yingying Chen 0001, Bo Yuan 0001 |
ECCV (4) | 6 |
| 2022 | Defending against Thru-barrier Stealthy Voice Attacks via Cross-Domain Sensing on Phoneme SoundsabstractThe open nature of voice input makes voice assistant (VA) systems vulnerable to various acoustic attacks (e.g., replay and voice synthesis attacks). A simple yet effective way for adversaries to launch these attacks is to hide behind barriers (e.g., a wall, a window, or a door) and give unauthorized voice commands without being observed by legitimate users. In this work, we develop an automated, training-free defense system that can protect VA systems from such thru-barrier acoustic attacks. Our study finds that acoustic signals passing through the barriers generally present a unique frequency-selective effect in the vibration domain. Thus, we propose to devise a system to capture this unique effect of barriers by leveraging low-cost, cross-domain sensing available in users’ wearables. The system replays the audio-domain signals with the wearable’s speaker and captures the conductive vibrations caused by the audio sounds in the vibration domain via the built-in accelerometer. To improve the proposed system’s reliability, we develop a unique vibration-domain enhancement method to extract the phonemes most sensitive to the frequency-selective effect of barriers. We identify effective vibration-domain features that capture the barriers’ effects in the vibration domain. A 2D-correlation-based method is developed to examine the speech similarity between the recordings from the VA system and the user’s wearable and detect thru-barrier attacks. Extensive experiments with various barriers and environments demonstrate that the proposed defense system can effectively defend random, replay, synthesis, and hidden voice attacks with less than 4% equal error rates. Cong Shi 0004, Tianming Zhao 0001, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Zhengkun Ye, Yan Wang 0003, Nitesh Saxena, Yingying Chen 0001 |
ICDCS | 2 |
| 2022 | Audio-domain position-independent backdoor attack via unnoticeable triggersabstractDeep learning models have become key enablers of voice user interfaces. With the growing trend of adopting outsourced training of these models, backdoor attacks, stealthy yet effective training-phase attacks, have gained increasing attention. They inject hidden trigger patterns through training set poisoning and overwrite the model's predictions in the inference phase. Research in backdoor attacks has been focusing on image classification tasks, while there have been few studies in the audio domain. In this work, we explore the severity of audio-domain backdoor attacks and demonstrate their feasibility under practical scenarios of voice user interfaces, where an adversary injects (plays) an unnoticeable audio trigger into live speech to launch the attack. To realize such attacks, we consider jointly optimizing the audio trigger and the target model in the training phase, deriving a position-independent, unnoticeable, and robust audio trigger. We design new data poisoning techniques and penalty-based algorithms that inject the trigger into randomly generated temporal positions in the audio input during training, rendering the trigger resilient to any temporal position variations. We further design an environmental sound mimicking technique to make the trigger resemble unnoticeable situational sounds and simulate played over-the-air distortions to improve the trigger's robustness during the joint optimization process. Extensive experiments on two important applications (i.e., speech command recognition and speaker recognition) demonstrate that our attack can achieve an average success rate of over 99% under both digital and physical attack settings. Cong Shi 0004, Tianfang Zhang, Huy Phan, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jian Liu 0001, Bo Yuan 0001, Yingying Chen 0001 |
MobiCom | 5 |
| 2022 | BioTag: robust RFID-based continuous user verification using physiological features from respirationabstractFor decades, one-time verification has been the standard for user verification at entry points, office rooms, etc. However, such approaches request users to provide their secrets (e.g., entering passwords and collecting fingerprints) and re-verify (e.g., screen shutdown) manually. Thus, they cannot confirm whether the user is a legitimate or an imposter after verification, which raises the urgent demand for a more convenient and secure solution to perform continuous user verification. However, existing continuous verification methods heavily rely on users' active participation, which is inconvenient. Toward this end, we propose a continuous user verification system, BioTag, which utilizes the low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to capture unique physiological characteristics rooted in the users' respiration motions for continuous user verification. Specifically, we use two RFID tags attached to a user's chest and abdomen to capture the user's intrinsic respiratory patterns via RFID signals. We develop respiratory feature extraction methods based on waveform morphology analysis and fuzzy wavelet transformation (FWPT) to derive unique biometric information from the user's respiration signals. Furthermore, we develop an adaptive classifier using the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) to identify legitimate users and attackers accurately. Extensive experiments involving 41 participants demonstrate that BioTag can robustly authenticate users and detect various types of adversaries with low training effort. In particular, our system can achieve over 95.2% and 94.8% verification accuracy on random attack and imitation attack scenarios, respectively. Bin Hu 0016, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jerry Q. Cheng, Richard Howard, Yingying Chen 0001 |
MobiHoc | 2 |
| 2022 | Continuous blood pressure monitoring using low-cost motion sensors on AR/VR headsetsabstractThe Augmented reality/Virtual reality (AR/VR) industry has ushered in a period of rapid development. The next decade leaves a massive imagination for AR/VR in terms of end product form, software, content, applications, and user increment. The AR & VR technology offers a gazillion of possibilities for smart healthcare. In this poster, we develop an innovative continuous blood pressure (CBP) estimation system leveraging the built-in motion sensors of AR/VR headsets for users. We design a deep learning-based PPG construction scheme using the motion sensor-based cardiac signal and estimate the continuous blood pressure using the regression model. Our experimental results show that our system can continuously estimate both systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) with a mean error of less than 4 mmHg and 0.9 mmHg respectively within a day. Tianming Zhao 0001, Zhengkun Ye, Tianfang Zhang, Cong Shi 0004, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Yan Wang 0003, Yingying Chen 0001, Nitesh Saxena |
MobiSys | 1 |
| 2022 | Personalized health monitoring via vital sign measurements leveraging motion sensors on AR/VR headsetsabstractAugmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets have attracted millions of users and gained predictable popularity. However, long-period usage of immersive technology may lead to health issues (e.g., cybersickness, anxiety). In this poster, we design a low-cost and personalized healthcare monitoring system grounded on vital sign tracking (i.e., breathing and heartbeat rate tracking), by exploiting built-in AR/VR motion sensors. The key insight is that the conductive vibrations induced by chest and heart movements can propagate through the user's cranial bones, thereby vibrating the AR/VR headset mounted on the user's head. To realize this system, we design signal processing techniques to cancel the human motions and derive the periods of breathing and heartbeat through frequency-domain analyses. We further design a user identification scheme based on respiratory and cardiac biometrics, which works with vital sign monitoring to provide personalized healthcare recommendations. Our experiment shows that the proposed scheme can achieve less than 5.7% error rate on breathing/heartbeat rate estimation and 95% accuracy on user identification. Tianfang Zhang, Cong Shi 0004, Tianming Zhao 0001, Zhengkun Ye, Payton Walker, Nitesh Saxena, Yan Wang 0003, Yingying Chen 0001 |
MobiSys | 3 |
| 2022 | Robust Continuous Authentication Using Cardiac Biometrics From Wrist-Worn WearablesabstractTraditional one-time user authentication is vulnerable to attacks when an adversary can obtain unauthorized privileges after a user’s initial login. Continuous user authentication (CA) has recently shown its great potential by enabling seamless user authentication with few users’ participation. We devise a low-cost system that can exploit users’ pulsatile signals from photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors in commodity wearable devices to perform CA. Our system requires zero user effort and applies to practical scenarios that have nonclinical PPG measurements with human motion artifacts (MAs). We explore the uniqueness of the human cardiac system and develop adaptive MA filtering methods to mitigate the impacts of transient and continuous activities from daily life. Furthermore, we identify general fiducial features and develop an adaptive classifier that can authenticate users continuously based on their cardiac characteristics with little additional training effort. Experiments with our wrist-worn PPG sensing platform on 20 participants under practical scenarios demonstrate that our system can achieve a high CA accuracy of over 90% and a low false detection rate of 4% in detecting random attacks. We show that our MA mitigation approaches can improve the CA accuracy by around 39% under both transient and continuous daily activity scenarios. Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jian Liu 0001, Jerry Q. Cheng, Yingying Chen 0001, Jiadi Yu |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 1 |
| 2022 | A Survey of Deep Learning on Mobile Devices: Applications, Optimizations, Challenges, and Research OpportunitiesabstractDeep learning (DL) has demonstrated great performance in various applications on powerful computers and servers. Recently, with the advancement of more powerful mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and touch pads), researchers are seeking DL solutions that could be deployed on mobile devices. Compared to traditional DL solutions using cloud servers, deploying DL on mobile devices have unique advantages in data privacy, communication overhead, and system cost. This article provides a comprehensive survey for the current studies of adopting and deploying DL on mobile devices. Specifically, we summarize and compare the state-of-the-art DL techniques on mobile devices in various application domains involving vision, speech/speaker recognition, human activity recognition, transportation mode detection, and security. We generalize an optimization pipeline for bringing DL to mobile devices, including model-oriented optimization mechanisms (e.g., pruning and quantization) and nonmodel-oriented optimization mechanisms (e.g., software accelerator and hardware design). Moreover, we summarize popular DL libraries regarding their support to state-of-the-art models (software) and processors (hardware). Based on our summarization, we further provide insights into potential research opportunities for developing DL for mobile devices. Tianming Zhao 0001, Yucheng Xie, Yan Wang 0003, Jerry Q. Cheng, Xiaonan Guo 0003, Bin Hu 0016, Yingying Chen 0001 |
Proc. IEEE | 1 |
| 2021 | MIXP: Efficient Deep Neural Networks Pruning for Further FLOPs Compression via Neuron BondabstractNeuron networks pruning is effective in compressing pre-trained CNNs for their deployment on low-end edge devices. However, few works have focused on reducing the computational cost of pruning and inference. We find that existing pruning methods usually remove parameters without fine-grained impact analysis, making it hard to achieve an optimal solution. This work develops a novel mixture pruning mechanism, MIXP, which can effectively reduce the computational cost of CNNs while maintaining a high weight compression ratio and model accuracy. We propose to remove neuron bond that can effectively reduce convolution computations and weight size in CNNs. We also design an influence factor to analyze the importance of neuron bonds and weights in a fine-grained way so that MIXP could achieve precise pruning with few retraining iterations. Experiments with MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that MIXP could achieve significantly fewer FLOPs and retraining iterations on four widely-used CNNs than existing pruning methods. Bin Hu 0016, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yucheng Xie, Yan Wang 0003, Xiaonan Guo 0003, Jerry Q. Cheng, Yingying Chen 0001 |
IJCNN | 2 |
| 2021 | Environment-independent In-baggage Object Identification Using WiFi SignalsabstractLow-cost in-baggage object identification is highly demanded in enhancing public safety and smart manufacturing. Existing approaches usually require specialized equipment and heavy deployment overhead, making them hard to scale for wide deployment. The recent WiFi-based approach is unsuitable for practical deployment as it did not address dynamic environmental impacts. In this work, we propose an environment-independent in-baggage object identification system by leveraging low-cost WiFi. We exploit the channel state information (CSI) to capture material and shape characteristics to facilitate fine-grained inbaggage object identification. A major challenge of building such a system is that CSI measurements are sensitive to real-world dynamics, such as different types of baggage, time-varying ambient noises and interferences, and different deployment environments. To tackle these problems, we develop WiFi features based on polarized directional antennas that can capture objects’ material and shape characteristics. A convolutional neural network-based model is developed to constructively integrate the WiFi features and perform accurate in-baggage object identification. We also develop a material-based domain adaptation using adversarial learning to facilitate fast deployments in different environments. We conduct extensive experiments involving 14 representation objects, 4 types of bags in 3 different room environments. The results show that our system can achieve over 97% in the same environment, and our domain adaptation method can improve the object identification accuracy by 42% when the system is deployed in a new environment with little training. Cong Shi 0004, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yucheng Xie, Tianfang Zhang, Yan Wang 0003, Xiaonan Guo 0003, Yingying Chen 0001 |
MASS | 2 |
| 2021 | WiFi-based Contactless Gesture Recognition Using Lightweight CNNabstractGesture recognition has the potential to become a part of contactless interactions with devices to improve accessibility and ease with applications. As the presence of portable devices remains standard, WiFi will continue to constantly connect these devices. Leveraging this availability, instead of relying on installing special sensors, ubiquitous WiFi sensing devices can decipher motion, thus mitigating additional costs. We develop a low-cost hand gesture recognition system utilizing Channel State Information (CSI) from a few subcarriers in prevalent WiFi signals. This information is sent through a lightweight signal segmentation algorithm and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that learns the gestures and successfully distinguishes them. Computationally demanding feature extraction is avoided as it increases processing time and does not scale well with additional gestures. Our model obtains an 96% accuracy rate across three different gestures on average. Keegan Kresge, Sophia Martino, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003 |
MASS | 3 |
| 2021 | WatchID: Wearable Device Authentication via Reprogrammable Vibration
Jerry Q. Cheng, Zixiao Wang 0005, Yan Wang 0003, Tianming Zhao 0001, Eric Xie |
MobiQuitous | 4 |
| 2021 | Towards Low-Cost Sign Language Gesture Recognition Leveraging WearablesabstractDifferent from traditional gestures, sign language gestures involve a lot of finger-level gestures without wrist or arm movements. They are hard to detect using existing motion sensors-based approaches. We introduce the first low-cost sign language gesture recognition system that can differentiate fine-grained finger movements using the Photoplethysmography (PPG) and motion sensors in commodity wearables. By leveraging the motion artifacts in PPG, our system can accurately recognize sign language gestures when there are large body movements, which cannot be handled by the traditional motion sensor-based approaches. We further explore the feasibility of using both PPG and motion sensors in wearables to improve the sign language gesture recognition accuracy when there are limited body movements. We develop a gradient boost tree (GBT) model and deep neural network-based model (i.e., ResNet) for classification. The transfer learning technique is applied to ResNet-based model to reduce the training effort. We develop a prototype using low-cost PPG and motions sensors and conduct extensive experiments and collect over 7000 gestures from 10 adults in the static and body-motion scenarios. Results demonstrate that our system can differentiate nine finger-level gestures from the American Sign Language with an average recognition accuracy over 98 percent. Tianming Zhao 0001, Jian Liu 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Hongbo Liu 0002, Yingying Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. | 1 |
| 2020 | Driver Identification Leveraging Single-turn Behaviors via Mobile DevicesabstractDrivers' identities are essential information that can facilitate a broad range of applications. For example, by understanding who is driving the vehicle when an accident happens, insurance companies could determine the liability and payment in a car accident claim case with high confidence. Another example, pick-up service companies could track the identities of their drivers to ensure that authorized drivers are driving esteemed clients to their destinations. While there are existing studies that can utilize video cameras and dedicated sensors to identify drivers, they either have privacy issues or require additional hardware, which is not practical enough for daily uses. In this paper, we devise a low-cost driver identification system, which can determine drivers' identities by using sensors readily available in wearable devices. Our system captures the unique driving behaviors during pervasive but momentary driving events (i.e., turning at intersections) with motion sensors, which are widely integrated into commodity wearable devices (e.g., smartphones and activity trackers). Toward this end, we extensively analyze people's driving behaviors and identify the critical turning events that capture people's unique behavioral patterns for driver identification. We design a fine-grained turning segmentation method that divides sensor data into critical turning stages (i.e., before, during, and after-turn stages), which provide multiple dimensions of turning behavioral metrics facilitating driver identification. The system extracts unique turning behavior features from time and frequency domains to enable driver identification based on drivers' turning behaviors at different types of turns. Extensive experiments are conducted with 12 drivers and various types of turns in real-road conditions. The results demonstrate that our system can identify drivers with high accuracy and low falsepositive rate based on one single turning event. Yan Wang 0003, Tianming Zhao 0001, Fatemeh Tahmasbi, Jerry Q. Cheng, Yingying Chen 0001, Jiadi Yu |
ICCCN | 2 |
| 2020 | Continuous User Verification via Respiratory BiometricsabstractThe ever-growing security issues in various mobile applications and smart devices create an urgent demand for a reliable and convenient user verification method. Traditional verification methods request users to provide their secrets (e.g., entering passwords and collecting fingerprints). We envision that the essential trend of user verification is to free users from active participation in the verification process. Toward this end, we propose a continuous user verification system, which re-uses the widely deployed WiFi infrastructure to capture the unique physiological characteristics rooted in user's respiratory motions. Different from the existing continuous verification approaches, posing dependency on restricted scenarios/user behaviors (e.g., keystrokes and gaits), our system can be easily integrated into any WiFi infrastructure to provide non-intrusive continuous verification. Specifically, we extract the respiration-related signals from the channel state information (CSI) of WiFi. We then derive the user-specific respiratory features based on the waveform morphology analysis and fuzzy wavelet transformation of the respiration signals. Additionally, a deep learning based user verification scheme is developed to identify legitimate users accurately and detect the existence of spoofing attacks. Extensive experiments involving 20 participants demonstrate that the proposed system can robustly verify/identify users and detect spoofers under various types of attacks. Jian Liu 0001, Yingying Chen 0001, Yudi Dong, Yan Wang 0003, Tianming Zhao 0001, Yu-Dong Yao |
INFOCOM | 5 |
| 2020 | TrueHeart: Continuous Authentication on Wrist-worn Wearables Using PPG-based BiometricsabstractTraditional one-time user authentication processes might cause friction and unfavorable user experience in many widely-used applications. This is a severe problem in particular for security-sensitive facilities if an adversary could obtain unauthorized privileges after a user's initial login. Recently, continuous user authentication (CA) has shown its great potential by enabling seamless user authentication with few active participation. We devise a low-cost system exploiting a user's pulsatile signals from the photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor in commercial wrist-worn wearables for CA. Compared to existing approaches, our system requires zero user effort and is applicable to practical scenarios with non-clinical PPG measurements having motion artifacts (MA). We explore the uniqueness of the human cardiac system and design an MA filtering method to mitigate the impacts of daily activities. Furthermore, we identify general fiducial features and develop an adaptive classifier using the gradient boosting tree (GBT) method. As a result, our system can authenticate users continuously based on their cardiac characteristics so little training effort is required. Experiments with our wrist-worn PPG sensing platform on 20 participants under practical scenarios demonstrate that our system can achieve a high CA accuracy of over 90% and a low false detection rate of 4% in detecting random attacks. Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jian Liu 0001, Yingying Chen 0001, Jerry Q. Cheng, Jiadi Yu |
INFOCOM | 1 |
| 2019 | Demo: Toward Continuous User Authentication Using PPG in Commodity Wrist-worn WearablesabstractWe present a photoplethysmography (PPG)-based continuous user authentication (CA) system leveraging the pervasively equipped PPG sensor in commodity wrist-worn wearables such as the smartwatch. Compared to existing approaches, our system does not require any users' interactions (e.g., performing specific gestures) and is applicable to practical scenarios where the user's daily activities cause motion artifacts (MA). Notably, we design a robust MA removal method to mitigate the impact of MA. Furthermore, we explore the uniqueness of the human cardiac system and extract the fiducial features in the PPG measurements to train the gradient boosting tree (GBT) classifier, which can effectively differentiate users continuously using low training effort. In particular, we build the prototype of our system using a commodity smartwatch and a WebSocket server running on a laptop for CA. In order to demonstrate the practical use of our system, we will demo our prototype under different scenarios (i.e., static and moving) to show it can effectively detect MA caused by daily activities and achieve a high authentication success rate. Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jian Liu 0001, Yingying Chen 0001 |
MobiCom | 1 |
| 2018 | PPG-based Finger-level Gesture Recognition Leveraging WearablesabstractThis paper subverts the traditional understanding of Photoplethysmography (PPG) and opens up a new direction of the utility of PPG in commodity wearable devices, especially in the domain of human computer interaction of fine-grained gesture recognition. We demonstrate that it is possible to leverage the widely deployed PPG sensors in wrist-worn wearable devices to enable finger-level gesture recognition, which could facilitate many emerging human-computer interactions (e.g., sign-language interpretation and virtual reality). While prior solutions in gesture recognition require dedicated devices (e.g., video cameras or IR sensors) or leverage various signals in the environments (e.g., sound, RF or ambient light), this paper introduces the first PPG-based gesture recognition system that can differentiate fine-grained hand gestures at finger level using commodity wearables. Our innovative system harnesses the unique blood flow changes in a user's wrist area to distinguish the user's finger and hand movements. The insight is that hand gestures involve a series of muscle and tendon movements that compress the arterial geometry with different degrees, resulting in significant motion artifacts to the blood flow with different intensity and time duration. By leveraging the unique characteristics of the motion artifacts to PPG, our system can accurately extract the gesture-related signals from the significant background noise (i.e., pulses), and identify different minute finger-level gestures. Extensive experiments are conducted with over 3600 gestures collected from 10 adults. Our prototype study using two commodity PPG sensors can differentiate nine finger-level gestures from American Sign Language with an average recognition accuracy over 88%, suggesting that our PPG-based finger-level gesture recognition system is promising to be one of the most critical components in sign language translation using wearables. Tianming Zhao 0001, Jian Liu 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Hongbo Liu 0002, Yingying Chen 0001 |
INFOCOM | 1 |
| 2018 | Poster: Leveraging Breathing for Continuous User AuthenticationabstractThis work proposes a continuous user verification system based on unique human respiratory-biometric characteristics extracted from the off-the-shelf WiFi signals. Our system innovatively re-uses widely available WiFi signals to capture the unique physiological characteristics rooted in respiratory motions for continuous authentication. Different from existing continuous authentication approaches having limited applicable scenarios due to their dependence on restricted user behaviors (e.g., keystrokes and gaits) or dedicated sensing infrastructures, our approach can be easily integrated into any existing WiFi infrastructure to provide non-invasive continuous authentication independent of user behaviors. Specifically, we extract representative features leveraging waveform morphology analysis and fuzzy wavelet transformation of respiration signals derived from the readily available channel state information (CSI) of WiFi. A respiration-based user authentication scheme is developed to accurately identify users and reject spoofers. Extensive experiments involving 20 subjects demonstrate that the proposed system can achieve a high authentication success rate of over 93% and robustly defend against various types of attacks. Jian Liu 0001, Yudi Dong, Yingying Chen 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Tianming Zhao 0001 |
MobiCom | 5 |
| 2018 | Your Heart Won't Lie: PPG-based Continuous Authentication on Wrist-worn Wearable DevicesabstractThis paper presents a photoplethysmography (PPG)-based continuous user authentication (CA) system, which especially leverages the PPG sensors in wrist-worn wearable devices to identify users. We explore the uniqueness of the human cardiac system captured by the PPG sensing technology. Existing CA systems require either the dedicated sensing hardware or specific gestures, whereas our system does not require any users' interactions but only the wearable device, which has already been pervasively equipped with PPG sensors. Notably, we design a robust motion artifacts (MA) removal method to mitigate the impact of MA from wrist movements. Additionally, we explore the characteristic fiducial features from PPG measurements to efficiently distinguish the human cardiac system. Furthermore, we develop a cardiac-based classifier for user identification using the Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT). Experiments with the prototype of the wrist-worn PPG sensing platform and 10 participants in different scenarios demonstrate that our system can effectively remove MA and achieve a high average authentication success rate over $90%$. Tianming Zhao 0001, Yan Wang 0003, Jian Liu 0001, Yingying Chen 0001 |
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