Cumulative and Ratio Time Evaluations in Keystroke Dynamics To Improve the Password Security Mechanism

The password mechanism is widely adopted as a control security system to legitimate access to a database or a transaction content or computing resources. This is because of the low cost of the mechanism, the software routine simplicity, and the facility for the user. But the password mechanism can suffer from serious vulnerabilities, which have to be reduced in some way. An aid comes from the keystroke dynamic evaluation, which uses the rhythm in which an individual types characters on a keyboard. It has been demonstrated how the keystroke dynamics are unique biometric template of the users typing pattern. So, the dwell time (the time a key pressed) and the flight time (the time between “key up” and the next “key down”) are used to verify the real user’s identity. In this work we investigated the keystroke dynamic already reported in literature but with some differences, so to obtain additional benefits. Rather than the commonly adopted absolute times (dwell and fly times), we deal with cumulative and ratio ones (i.e. sum and ratio of dwell and fly times), taking into account that the latest are times which do not change even if the user’s typing style evolves with practice