Developing a Keystroke Biometric System for Continual Authentication of Computer Users

Data windows of keyboard input are analyzed to continually authenticate computer users and verify that they are the authorized ones. Because the focus is on fast intruder detection, the authentication process operates on short bursts of roughly a minute of keystroke input, while the training process can be extensive and use hours of input. The biometric system consists of components for data capture, feature extraction, authentication classification, and receiver-operating-characteristic curve generation. Using keystroke data from 120 users, system performance was obtained as a function of two independent variables: the user population size and the number of keystrokes per sample. For each population size, the performance increased (and the equal error rate decreased) roughly logarithmically as the number of keystrokes per sample was increased. The best closed-system performance results of 99 percent on 14 participants and 96 percent on 30 participants indicate the potential of this approach.