Active Authentication of Keyboard Users: Performance Evaluation on 736 Subjects
This work addresses the need for practical, non-intrusive authentication methods for keyboard users, showing incremental progress by validating feasibility on a larger dataset than previous studies.
The study tackled the problem of evaluating keystroke-based active authentication systems for large-scale deployment, demonstrating high accuracy and scalability using a real system on a dataset of 736 subjects.
Keystroke timing based active authentication systems are conceptually attractive because: (i) they use the keyboard as the sensor and are not hardware-cost prohibitive, and (ii) they use the keystrokes generated from normal usage of computers as input and are not interruptive. Several experiments have been reported on the performance of keystroke based authentication using small datasets. None of them, however, study a practical active authentication system, and the feasibility of keystroke based active authentication system for large scale and continuous deployment is still not demonstrated in the literature. We investigate this issue and establish that keystroke based active authentication systems can be highly accurate and scalable. We use a real active authentication system that we developed and analyze a dataset large enough to produce statistically significant results. We also present empirical methodologies used for characterizing various design parameters of the developed system.