Unconstrained keystroke dynamics authentication with shared secret

Among all the existing biometric modalities, authentication systems based on keystroke dynamics present interesting advantages. These solutions are well accepted by users and cheap as no additional sensor is required for authenticating the user before accessing to an application. In the last thirty years, many researchers have proposed, different algorithms aimed at increasing the performance of this approach. Their main drawback lies on the large number of data required for the enrollment step. As a consequence, the verification system is barely usable, because the enrollment is too restrictive. In this work, we propose a new method based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning satisfying industrial conditions (i.e., few samples per user are needed during the enrollment phase to create its template). In this method, users are authenticated through the keystroke dynamics of a shared secret (chosen by the system administrator). We use the GREYC keystroke database that is composed of a large number of users (100) for validation purposes. We compared the proposed method with six methods from the literature (selected based on their ability to work with few enrollment samples). Experimental results show that, even though the computation time to build the template can be longer with our method (54 s against 3 s for most of the others), its performance outperforms the other methods in an industrial context (Equal Error Rate of 15.28% against 16.79% and 17.02% for the two best methods of the state-of-the-art, on our dataset and five samples to create the template, with a better computation time than the second best method). (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.