Abstract Smartphones play a key role in our daily life, they can replace our watch, calendar, and mail box but also our credit card, house keys and in the near future our identity documents. Their increasing use in storing sensitive information, has raised the need to protect users and their data through secure authentication protocols. The main achievement of this work is to make the smartphone not only the cause of the problem but also part of the solution. Here, the Sensor Pattern Noise of the smartphone embedded camera and the HOG features of the user's face are combined for a double check of user identity.