Enhanced free-text keystroke continuous authentication based on dynamics of wrist motion

Abstract

Free-text keystroke is a form of behavioral biometrics which has great potential for addressing the security limitations of conventional one-time authentication by continuously monitoring the user's typing behaviors. This paper presents a new, enhanced continuous authentication approach by incorporating the dynamics of both keystrokes and wrist motions. Based upon two sets of features (free-text keystroke latency features and statistical wrist motion patterns extracted from the wrist-worn smartwatches), two one-vs-all Random Forest Ensemble Classifiers (RFECs) are constructed and trained respectively. A Dynamic Trust Model (DTM) is then developed to fuse the two classifiers' decisions and realize non-time-blocked real-time authentication. In the free-text typing experiments involving 25 human subjects, an imposter/intruder can be detected within no more than one sentence (average 56 keystrokes) with an FRR of 1.82% and an FAR of 1.94%. Compared with the scheme relying on only keystroke latency which has an FRR of 4.66%, an FAR of 17.92% and the required number of keystroke of 162, the proposed authentication system shows significant improvements in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and usability.