Investigating Gender Bias in Touch Biometrics

2026-06-09

AI Summary

This study investigates the presence of gender bias in swipe-based behavioral biometric authentication to ensure equitable performance across genders. Leveraging the BBMAS and ANTAL datasets, the authors employ XGBoost and DenseNet models and, for the first time in this domain, apply non-parametric statistical tests—including Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Mann-Whitney U, and Wasserstein permutation tests—to systematically evaluate gender disparities in authentication performance. Experimental results demonstrate that XGBoost achieves 92% and 94% accuracy on the two datasets, respectively, with no statistically significant differences in false acceptance rates (FAR) or false rejection rates (FRR) between male and female users across most configurations. These findings indicate that high authentication accuracy and low gender bias can be simultaneously attained.

Abstract

Behavioral biometrics offer a promising approach for continuous authentication, but their fairness across demographic groups remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates gender bias in swipe-based authentication using the BBMAS (117 users) and ANTAL (71 users) datasets and evaluates XGBoost and DenseNet classifiers through False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). XGBoost achieved authentication accuracies of 92% and 94% on the BBMAS and ANTAL datasets, respectively, while statistical tests (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Mann-Whitney, and Wasserstein permutation) found no significant gender differences in authentication error rates across almost all experimental settings. These findings suggest that swipe-based authentication can achieve high accuracy while maintaining comparable performance for male and female users, supporting its potential as a fair and reliable behavioral biometric modality.

Problem

• gender bias
• touch biometrics
• behavioral biometrics
• fairness
• continuous authentication

Innovation

• gender bias
• touch biometrics
• behavioral biometrics
• fairness
• swipe authentication