Keystroke dynamics based user authentication using Histogram Gradient Boosting

Abstract

User authentication is a vital part of securing digital services and preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to the system. Nowadays, organizations use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to provide robust protection by utilizing two or more identity procedures instead of using Single Factor Authentication (SFA) which became less secure. Keystroke dynamics is a behavioral biometric that examines a user’s typing rhythm to determine the subject’s legitimacy using the system. Keystroke dynamics have a minimal implementation cost and do not need special hardware in the authentication process since the gathering of typing data is reasonably straightforward and does not involve additional effort from the user. In this work, we present an efficient approach that uses the quantile transformation that transforms data distribution into uniform distribution which significantly reduces the impact of outlier and extreme values. Histogram Gradient Boosting is employed as the primary classifier for the training and testing phase. Our proposed approach is evaluated on Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) keystroke benchmark dataset which has achieved 97.96% of average accuracy and 0.014 of average equal error rate (EER) across all subjects which outperforms all the previous advances in both machine and deep learning approaches.