Title: Investigating the accuracy of free-text keystroke dynamics authentication in touchscreen devices

Authors: Suliman A. Alsuhibany; Muna Almushyti; Fatimah Alkhudhayr

Addresses: Computer Science Department, College of Computer, Qassim University, Qassim, Saudi Arabia ' Deanship of Educational Services, Qassim University, Qassim, Saudi Arabia ' Deanship of Educational Services, Qassim University, Qassim, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Security on smartphones has become a substantial topic since the amount of security relevant data and information stored on them has been increasing. While the password is commonly used as a traditional approach for user authentication, it suffers from a security-usability trade-off dilemma. Accordingly, the keystroke dynamics authentication approach can provide ease of use to the user as well as robust security. This paper investigates the feasibility of utilising user-typing behaviours on touchscreen keypads for the authentication process via free-text keystroke dynamics. In constructing the timing vectors, three timing features are used: hold time, flight time and digraph duration. Additionally, Euclidian and Manhattan distances were utilised to find the degree of similarity between the user's login data and user's profile. An Android application was developed and evaluated through an experimental study. Thus, we achieved a very encouraging result, as we were able to show that applying the free-text method indeed influences the accuracy of user authentication on a touchscreen device.

Keywords: authentication; biometrics; keystroke dynamics; touchscreen; security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2020.110816

International Journal of Biometrics, 2020 Vol.12 No.4, pp.430 - 445

Received: 26 Nov 2018
Accepted: 30 Dec 2019
Published online: 29 Oct 2020 *

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