Itus is a framework that can be used in Android apps to provide implicit authentication support, where a smartphone continuously authenticates its owner based on the owner's behaviour without requiring deliberate actions by the owner. Itus can protect user data in scenarios such as the following:
- enterprises to provide additional security for their corporate apps on employee BYODs
- banks, mail service providers, and OSNs to protect the identity and data of their users on mobile devices
- everyday app developers who want to protect user data in their apps (e.g., browser app, communication app, and photo gallery app)
Itus has been provided as an Android library and it can be downloaded to provide implicit authentication support in your app in a few easy steps. The salient features of Itus include:
- Minimum code changes required to provide implicit authentication support (as few as 2 lines of code if tweaking is not required)
- Itus is fully compatible with Android devices with SDK version 2.2 (API level 8) and beyond
- Itus incurs trivial performance overhead which does not affect the user experience
- Itus is flexible in that it allows you to choose how you want to authenticate the users provides constructs for explicitly authenticating the user
- Itus oracle (a Python based utility) is also provided to automate the process
- Itus is opensource and comes with a GPL licence
Itus has been developed by Hassan Khan, Aaron Atwater and Urs Hengartner at the CrySP lab, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo.
More information about Itus can be found in this paper:
H. Khan, A. Atwater, and U. Hengartner. Itus: An Implicit Authentication Framework for Android. Proc. of 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2014), Maui HI, September 2014.