Abstract or Summary:
Despite decades of research into biometric authentication, few such systems have been deployed widely. Recently, however, popular smartphone platforms have offered average users the opportunity to use biometric authentication in the real world. Through two ongoing studies, we are investigating user perception of these systems, as well as their usability. We focus on Android's face authentication system and the iPhone fingerprint authentication system. In our first study, an online survey conducted on Amazon's MTurk, we ask users who have tried these biometric authentication systems on their own phones about the reasons for deciding to adopt, or not adopt, these systems. In our second study, a lab usability study, we compare the usability of these biometric authentication systems to standard PIN authentication under a variety of conditions we hypothesized might cause usability issues with these systems. Our initial findings have several implications for the future design of mobile biometric authentication systems.