Continuous authentication using deep neural networks ensemble on keystroke dynamics

Abstract

During the last years, several studies have been proposed about user identification by means of keystroke analysis. Keystroke dynamics has a lower cost when compared to other biometric-based methods since such a system does not require any additional specific sensor, apart from a traditional keyboard, and it allows the continuous identification of the users in the background as well. The research proposed in this paper concerns (i) the creation of a large integrated dataset of users typing on a traditional keyboard obtained through the integration of three real-world datasets coming from existing studies and (ii) the definition of an ensemble learning approach, made up of basic deep neural network classifiers, with the objective of distinguishing the different users of the considered dataset by exploiting a proper group of features able to capture their typing style. After an optimization phase, in order to find the best possible base classifier, we evaluated the ensemble super-classifier comparing different voting techniques, namely majority and Bayesian, as well as training allocation strategies, i.e., random and K-means. The approach we propose has been assessed using the created very large integrated dataset and the obtained results are very promising, achieving an accuracy of up to 0.997 under certain evaluation conditions.

Keywords

• Keystroke analysis
• Biometric user identification
• Ensemble learning
• Deep learning
• Neural networks