Professor Yingying Chen and her students have received the Distinguished Paper Award from the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025 for her work on “Harnessing Vital Sign Vibration Harmonics for Effortless and Inbuilt XR User Authentication.” ACM CCS is widely considered as one of the top-tier security conferences, among the big-four security conferences. This work represents a joint research effort among New Jersey Institute of Technology, Temple University, and Texas A&M University:
“Harnessing Vital Sign Vibration Harmonics for Effortless and Inbuilt XR User Authentication”
Authors: Tianfang Zhang, Qiufan Ji, Md Mojibur Rahman Redoy Akanda, Zhengkun Ye, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Cong Shi, Yan Wang, Nitesh Saxena, and Yingying Chen.
This award-winning paper introduces the first effortless and inbuilt user authentication system for Extended Reality (XR). It harnesses the harmonics of vibrations naturally generated by users’ vital signs (e.g., breathing and heartbeat) to derive unique and reliable biometric signatures. Different from traditional password- or gesture-based methods that interrupt immersive experiences or require extra hardware, the proposed approach leverages existing XR motion sensors to unobtrusively capture the subtle vibrations transmitted through a user’s skull and facial tissues. By analyzing harmonic frequency ratios that encode each user’s distinctive anatomical features, combined with adaptive signal filtering and transformer-based deep learning, the system enables seamless authentication without any explicit user action. Long-term experiments with 52 participants using Meta Quest and HTC Vive Pro Eye headsets demonstrated over 95% true positive and 98% true negative rates across diverse XR contexts, validating its robustness, security, and practicality for real-world deployment. This breakthrough showcases a major step forward toward secure, user-transparent authentication in next-generation XR environments.
The paper was presented at ACM CCS held from October 13 - October 17, 2025.
Congratulations to Prof. Chen and her students!
