Authentication for drone delivery through a novel way of using face biometrics

Drone delivery, which makes use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver or pick up packages, is an emerging service. To ensure that a package is picked up by a legitimate drone and delivered to the correct user, mutual authentication between drones and users is critical. As delivery drones are expensive and may carry important packages, drones should keep a distance from users until the authentication succeeds. Thus, authentication approaches that require human-drone physical contact cannot be applied. Face recognition does not need human-drone contact. However, it has major limitations: (1) it needs users to enroll their face information, (2) it is vulnerable to attacks, such as 3D-printed masks and adversarial examples, and (3) it only supports a drone to authenticate a user (rather than mutual authentication). We propose a novel way of using face biometrics, without these limitations, and apply it to building an authentication system for drone delivery, named Smile2Auth. The evaluation shows that Smile2Auth is highly accurate, secure and usable.