Recent Trends in User Authentication – A Survey

Recent advancements in technology have led to profusion of personal computing devices, such as smart phone, tablet, watch, glasses, and many more. This has contributed to the realization of a digital world where important daily tasks can be performed over the Internet from any place and at any time and using any device. At the same time, advances in pervasive computing technologies have brought to fruition the concept of smart spaces that target the automated provision of customized services to the inhabitants effortlessly. User authentication, i.e., a procedure to verify the identity of the user, is essential in the digital world so as to protect the user’s personal data stored online (e.g., online bank accounts) and on personal devices (e.g., smart phones) and to also enable customized services in smart spaces (e.g., adjusting room temperature and so on). Recently, traditional authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords or fingerprints) have been repeatedly shown to be vulnerable to subversion. Researchers thus have proposed numerous new mechanisms to authenticate the users in the aforementioned scenarios. This paper presents an overview of these novel systems, so as to guide the future research efforts in these domains.