Don’t Use Fingerprint, it’s Raining! How People Use and Perceive Context-Aware Selection of Mobile Authentication

This paper investigates how smartphone users perceive switching from their primary authentication mechanism to a fallback one, based on the context. This is useful in cases where the primary mechanism fails (e.g., wet fingers when using fingerprint). While prior work introduced the concept, we are the first to investigate its perception by users and their willingness to follow a system's suggestion for a switch. We present findings from a two-week field study (N=29) using an Android app, showing that users are willing to adopt alternative mechanisms when prompted. We discuss how context-awareness can improve the perception of authentication reliability and potentially improve usability and security.