A perspective study towards biometric-based rider authentication schemes for driverless taxis

Driverless vehicles exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer rides to their users with minimal or no human input. Driverless vehicles as taxis are indeed evolving an entirely new transportation concept, Transportation-As-A-Service (TAAS), steered by well-proven client-server infrastructures. Typically, the servers, managed by multinational companies (e.g., Waymo), operate driverless taxis for public transportation, whereas the clients are simply the smartphone-based applications that can be used by customers for one-time registration and booking rides with driverless taxis anytime anywhere. In this paper, we perform a perspective study towards secure and usable biometric-based rider authentication schemes for driverless taxis. Our study is complemented by an online survey that comprises 75 responses from participants, worldwide. We published the survey on social media platforms like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and various public transport users groups to collect public poll for rider authentication for driverless taxis. Approximately, 90% of the overall participants in our survey either strongly agreed or agreed with the necessity to deploy biometric-based rider authentication for driverless taxis. Then, considering the survey's results, we proposed the design of a possible solution for riders biometric authentication.