The Relationship Between Usability and Biometric Authentication in Mobile Phones

Abstract

It is estimated that over 1 billion people are active mobile phone users in 2018. When using a mobile phone, there are a variety of ways to authenticate and “secure” the device, and biometric authentication is becoming an increasingly common way to do this, however, biometric authentication is not always as usable as it could be. Both usability and security are important, yet many people believe that there is a trade-off between the two. The focus of this paper was to better understand usability, computer security, and within computer security more specifically biometric authentication, and how all three can work together to create systems that are both usable and secure. A survey and interviews were conducted based on previous research to understand perceptions from the general population, usability experts, and security/biometrics experts. The results do indicate that there is indeed a perceived trade-off between usability and computer security.