Continuous Authentication Using Behavioral Biometrics

Currently, the standard methods to authenticate a computer/network user typically occur once at the initial log-in. These authentication methods involve user proxies, especially passwords and smart cards such as common access cards (CACs) and service ID cards. Passwords suffer from a variety of vulnerabilities including brute-force and dictionary based attacks, while smart cards and other physical tokens used for authentication can be lost or stolen. As a result, the computer systems are extremely vulnerable to "masquerading attacks", which refers to illegitimate activity on a computer system when an unauthorized human or software impersonates a user on a computer system or network. These attacks can be challenging to detect as they are mostly carried out by insiders or people or software familiar with the authorized user. By actively and continually authenticating a user, intruders can be identified before they hijack the user session of an authorized individual who may have momentarily stepped away from his/her console. In this talk, we will present our results on continuous authentication using keystroke dynamics as the behavioral biometric. The methods we developed can also be readily extended to protecting wired and wireless networks, mobile devices, etc.