HeadSonic: Usable Bone Conduction Earphone Authentication via Head-Conducted Sounds

Earables (ear wearables) are rapidly emerging as a new platform encompassing a diverse of personal applications, prompting the development of authentication schemes to protect user privacy. Existing earable authentication methods are all specifically designed for air-conduction earphones, which are not suited for bone conduction earphones (BCEs) that rely on bone conduction mechanisms. In this paper, we propose HeadSonic, a usable BCE authentication system based on the unique head-conducted sounds, which can be acquired when the user wears the BCE device. Specifically, the system emits a millisecond-level sound to initiate the authentication session. The signal captured by the BCE microphone is propagated through the user's head, which is unique in density, geometry, and bone-tissue ratio. It operates implicitly, while maintaining robustness across different behaviors. Extensive experiments involving 60 subjects demonstrate that HeadSonic achieves a commendable balanced accuracy of 96.59%, proving its efficacy and resilience against replay and synthesis attacks.