Abstract

Due to the rapid developments of cloud technologies, mobile devices, especially smartphones, have become much more powerful, bringing people great convenience. People can do many things on their smartphones: checking email, updating Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram, or shopping via different apps. With all these applications, people tend to access their smartphones frequently and instantly, i.e., they want to use the phone right away. On the other hand, more and more sensitive information is now stored or accessible on smartphones such as Visa Signature or Paypal apps. Smartphones need to be protected more than ever before.

How to protect smartphones while still provide convenience becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we describe an approach aiming to solve this problem. The approach provides an authentication framework to protect smartphones. This authentication framework requires stronger authentication to accesses that are classified as suspicious, whereas still offers quick access for those authentic.