Jerusalem – New Phone App Aims To Track Signature Movement, Block Forgery

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    Jerusalem – A team of researchers at a cyber security lab at Ben Gurion University in the Negev and a big data lab from Tel Aviv University has developed a technology to use smartwatches and software to verify handwritten signatures and to detect even the most skilled forgeries.

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    The findings, published in an article entitled Handwritten Signature Verification Using Hand-Worn Devices last month focused on 66 participants who were asked to register their genuine signatures 15 times each on Samsung tablets while wearing smartwatches. The application sampled the wrist movement along the x, y and z axes. Each student then traced other people’s genuine signatures and was asked to forge five of them.

    Spokespeople for the research teams said the lack of real-time verification for hand-written signatures enables large-scale consumer fraud, including identity theft, and causes immense financial loss globally.

    The software uses motion data gathered from the movements of a person’s wrist to identify the writer during the signing process. This information, compiled from accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, senses changes in rotational motion and orientation, and trains a machine learning algorithm to distinguish between genuine or forged signatures.

    “We based our hypothesis on the assumption that people’s signing patterns are unique and very difficult for others to imitate, and that this uniqueness can be captured adequately using the motion sensors of a hand-held device,” said Ben Nassi, a graduate student in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

    “The results for both random and skilled forgery tests were encouraging, and confirmed our system is able to successfully distinguish between genuine and forged signatures with a high degree of accuracy… Using a wrist-worn device or fitness tracker provides more comprehensive data than other wearable devices, since it measures the gestures of a user’s arm, hand and all fingers rather than just a single finger or the forearm,” Nassi said.

    Researchers also included Prof. Yuval Elovici, director of BGU’s Cyber Security Research Center, Dr. Erez Shmueli of TAU’s Department of Industrial Engineering, and Alona Levy, a graduate student in Dr. Shmueli’s department.


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    7 years ago

    What’s the name of the app?