Online User Authentication System Using Keystroke Dynamics

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Salem, Asma^{; *} | Sharieh, Ahmad | Jabri, Riad

Affiliations: King Abdullah II School of Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: dr_asmasalem@yahoo.com.

Abstract: Nowadays, people become more connected to the internet using their mobile devices. They tend to use their critical and sensitive data among many applications. These applications provide security via user authentication. Authentication by passwords is a reliable and efficient access control procedure, but it is not sufficient. Additional procedures are needed to enhance the security of these applications. Keystroke dynamics (KSD) is one of the common behavioral based systems. KSD rhythm uses combinations of timing and non-timing features that are extracted and processed from several devices. This work presents a novel authentication approach based on two factors: password and KSD. Also, it presents extensive comparative analysis conducted between authentication systems based on KSDs. It proposes a prototype for a keyboard in order to collect timing and non-timing information from KSDs. Hence, the proposed approach uses timing and several non-timing features. These features have a demonstrated significant role for improving the performance measures of KSD behavioral authentication systems. Several experiments have been done and show acceptable level in performance measures as a second authentication factor. The approach has been tested using multiple classifiers. When Random Forest classifier has been used, the approach reached 0% error rate with 100% accuracy for classification.

Keywords: Authentication, security, biometric-based security, keystroke dynamics, random forest classifier, typing behavior

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-210081

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 185-215, 2023