MicPrint

Smartphones are the most commonly used computing platform for accessing sensitive and important information placed on the Internet. Authenticating the smartphone's identity in addition to the user's identity is a widely adopted security augmentation method since conventional user authentication methods, such as password entry, often fail to provide strong protection by itself. In this paper, we propose a sensor-based device fingerprinting technique for identifying and authenticating individual mobile devices. Our technique, called MicPrint, exploits the unique characteristics of embedded microphones in mobile devices due to manufacturing variations in order to uniquely identify each device. Unlike conventional sensor-based device fingerprinting that are prone to spoofing attack via malware, MicPrint is fundamentally spoof-resistant since it uses acoustic features that are prominent only when the user blocks the microphone hole. This simple user intervention acts as implicit permission to fingerprint the sensor and can effectively prevent unauthorized fingerprinting using malware. We implement MicPrint on Google Pixel 1 and Samsung Nexus to evaluate the accuracy of device identification. We also evaluate its security against simple raw data attacks and sophisticated impersonation attacks. The results show that after several incremental training cycles under various environmental noises, MicPrint can achieve high accuracy and reliability for both smartphone models.