Users ID'ed through typing, mouse movements

22 Nov 2013

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Users ID'ed through typing, mouse movements

By Darren Pauli on Nov 22, 2013 2:16 PM

Continuous authentication app created from DARPA research.

Researchers have built a continuous authentication platform that can
accurately identify users based on their typing patterns.

A series of 90 minute typing tests carried out on 2000 people at Iowa State
University found users could be identified with a half percent margin of
error based on the way they hit keys.

The work has been spun into an application that could continuously
authenticate users and lock accounts if another person jumped on the computer
resulting in irregularities being detected. (pdf)

Uniquely syncopated mouse and keyboard patterns made it possible to identify
users, Iowa State University associate professor Morris Chang said.

“These pauses between words, searches for unusual characters and spellings of
unfamiliar words, all have to do with our past experiences, our learning
experiences,” Chang said. “And so we call them cognitive fingerprints which
manifest themselves in typing rhythms.”

“The system can see if the same person or an imposter is coming in to hijack
the computer."

The year-long research run together with electrical engineering students
Terry Fang, Kuan-Hsing Ho and Danny Shih received a half a million dollar
grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which sought to
discover if continuous authentication was possible.

It was now being extended to capture mouse movements and touch inputs from
mobile devices with an additional $1.76 million dollars from the agency over
two years.

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