The National Security Agency is testing out Lockheed Martin's smartphone-swipe recognition software that attempts to identify an individual user based on their unique finger stroke on a smartphone's touch screen.
John Mears, senior fellow for Lockheed IT and Security Solutions, told NextGov that Lockheed has been working with the NSA to develop "secure gesture authentication as a technique for using smartphones," and they are "actually able to use it."
The technology, called "Mandrake," measures the speed, acceleration and curve of a user's finger strokes on a smartphone screen, according to NextGov.
"Nobody else has the same strokes," said Mears. "People can forge your handwriting in two dimensions, but they couldn't forge it in three or four dimensions."
The third dimension is the pressure applied to the screen, while the fourth is the time it takes to complete the swipe motion, Mears explains, telling NextGov, "The most advanced handwriting-type authentication tracks you in four dimensions."
Lockheed officials said they weren't privy to whether the NSA has operationally deployed the Mandrake swipe recognition technology, or how the agency plans to use it.
Mandrake would also be a useful tool for emergency first responders who might not have the ability to log in to incident command software while en route, Mears said.
"If you are going 100 miles down the road, you are not going to enter a complex 12-character password to authenticate yourself," he said. "We have some customers who deal with radioactive material and they can't touch things" as small as a smartphone keyboard with gloves on. "How do they authenticate?"
Lockheed has also worked with the FBI in the past, most recently designing Next Generation Identification, a $1 billion biometric system capable of identifying individuals from a fingerprint, palm print, retina scan and tattoo image. The FBI has said it could eventually include voice and "gait matching" as well.
