Keystroke dynamics in the pre-touchscreen era

Biometric authentication seeks to measure an individual’s unique physiological attributes for the purpose of identity verification. Conventionally, this task has been realized via analyses of fingerprints or signature iris patterns. However, whilst such methods effectively offer a superior security protocol compared with password-based approaches for example, their substantial infrastructure costs, and intrusive nature, make them undesirable and indeed impractical for many scenarios. An alternative approach seeks to develop similarly robust screening protocols through analysis of typing patterns, formally known as keystroke dynamics. Here, keystroke analysis methodologies can utilize multiple variables, and a range of mathematical techniques, in order to extract individuals’ typing signatures. Such variables may include measurement of the period between key presses, and/or releases, or even key-strike pressures. Statistical methods, neural networks, and fuzzy logic have often formed the basis for quantitative analysis on the data gathered, typically from conventional computer keyboards. Extension to more recent technologies such as numerical keypads and touch-screen devices is in its infancy, but obviously important as such devices grow in popularity. Here, we review the state of knowledge pertaining to authentication via conventional keyboards with a view toward indicating how this platform of knowledge can be exploited and extended into the newly emergent type-based technological contexts

Deployment of Keystroke Analysis on a Smartphone

The current security on mobile devices is often limited to the Personal Identification Number (PIN), a secretknowledge based technique that has historically demonstrated to provide ineffective protection from misuse. Unfortunately, with the increasing capabilities of mobile devices, such as online banking and shopping, the need for more effective protection is imperative. This study proposes the use of two-factor authentication as an enhanced technique for authentication on a Smartphone. Through utilising secret-knowledge and keystroke analysis, it is proposed a stronger more robust mechanism will exist. Whilst keystroke analysis using mobile devices have been proven effective in experimental studies, these studies have only utilised the mobile device for capturing samples rather than the more computationally challenging task of performing the actual authentication. Given the limited processing capabilities of mobile devices, this study focuses upon deploying keystroke analysis to a mobile device utilising numerous pattern classifiers. Given the trade-off with computation versus performance, the results demonstrate that the statistical classifiers are the most effective

Strengthening e-banking security using keystroke dynamics

This paper investigates keystroke dynamics and its possible use as a tool to prevent or detect fraud in the banking industry. Given that banks are constantly on the lookout for improved methods to address the menace of fraud, the paper sets out to review keystroke dynamics, its advantages, disadvantages and potential for improving the security of e-banking systems. This paper evaluates keystroke dynamics suitability of use for enhancing security in the banking sector. Results from the literature review found that keystroke dynamics can offer impressive accuracy rates for user identification. Low costs of deployment and minimal change to users modus operandi make this technology an attractive investment for banks. The paper goes on to argue that although this behavioural biometric may not be suitable as a primary method of authentication, it can be used as a secondary or tertiary method to complement existing authentication systems

Keystroke Biometrics in Response to Fake News Propagation in a Global Pandemic

This work proposes and analyzes the use of keystroke biometrics for content de-anonymization. Fake news have become a powerful tool to manipulate public opinion, especially during major events. In particular, the massive spread of fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments and companies to fight against missinformation. In this context, the ability to link multiple accounts or profiles that spread such malicious content on the Internet while hiding in anonymity would enable proactive identification and blacklisting. Behavioral biometrics can be powerful tools in this fight. In this work, we have analyzed how the latest advances in keystroke biometric recognition can help to link behavioral typing patterns in experiments involving 100,000 users and more than 1 million typed sequences. Our proposed system is based on Recurrent Neural Networks adapted to the context of content de-anonymization. Assuming the challenge to link the typed content of a target user in a pool of candidate profiles, our results show that keystroke recognition can be used to reduce the list of candidate profiles by more than 90%. In addition, when keystroke is combined with auxiliary data (such as location), our system achieves a Rank-1 identification performance equal to 52.6% and 10.9% for a background candidate list composed of 1K and 100K profiles, respectively.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2004.0362

Keystroke dynamics as signal for shallow syntactic parsing

Keystroke dynamics have been extensively used in psycholinguistic and writing research to gain insights into cognitive processing. But do keystroke logs contain actual signal that can be used to learn better natural language processing models? We postulate that keystroke dynamics contain information about syntactic structure that can inform shallow syntactic parsing. To test this hypothesis, we explore labels derived from keystroke logs as auxiliary task in a multi-task bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM). Our results show promising results on two shallow syntactic parsing tasks, chunking and CCG supertagging. Our model is simple, has the advantage that data can come from distinct sources, and produces models that are significantly better than models trained on the text annotations alone.Comment: In COLING 201

How to improve performance of Neural Network in the hardened password mechanism

A wide variety of systems, ubiquitous in our dailyactivities, require personal identification schemes that verify theidentity of individual requesting their services. A non exhaustivelist of such application includes secure access to buildings,computer systems, cellular phones, ATMs, crossing of nationalborders, boarding of planes among others. In the absence ofrobust schemes, these systems are vulnerable to the wiles of animpostor. Current systems are based on the three vertex of theauthentication triangle which are, possession of the token,knowledge of a secret and possessing the required biometric. Dueto weaknesses of the de facto password scheme, inclusion of itsinherent keystroke rhythms, have been proposed and systems thatimplement such security measures are also on the market. Thiscorrespondence investigates possibility and ways for optimisingperformance of hardened password mechanism using the widelyaccepted Neural Network classifier. It represents continuation ofa previous work in that direction