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