The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI lab at UF have a new NSF grant, in collaboration with Dr. Tempestt Neal and Dr. Shaun Canavan at USF, to pursue a project to understand users’ mental models of continuous (passive) authentication in smart environments, as well as to evaluate a proof-of-concept system with current sensing technologies. Continuous authentication systems transparently observe a user’s natural multimodal behaviors (e.g., gesture, speech, movement, etc.) as input for passive authentication using all available signals. Because they do not require explicit authentication interactions to be initiated by the user, we hypothesize that they will be more accessible to users of all ages. Such authentication methods come with privacy concerns which we will also investigate from a user-centered perspective. We are funded under the Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SATC) program. For more information about our two-year project plans and scope, check out our full abstract on the NSF website here.