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Accelprint:Accelerometers Are Different By Birth, Sanorita Dey

Theses and Dissertations

This paper submits a hypothesis that smartphone accelerometers possess unique fingerprints. We believe that the fingerprints arise from hardware imperfections during the sensor manufacturing process, causing every sensor chip to respond differently to the same motion stimulus. The differences in responses are subtle enough that they do not affect most of the higher level functions computed on them. Nonetheless, upon close inspection, these fingerprints emerge with consistency, and can even be somewhat independent of the stimulus that generates them. Measurements and classification on 80 standalone accelerometer chips, 25 Android phones, and 2 tablets, show precision and recall upward of 96%, …