11.6. ConclusionAlthough keystroke biometrics systems have been pursued actively by academics and inventors for over a quarter of a century, the field is still maturing. Lack of a shared set of standards with regard to data collection, benchmarking, and measurement has prevented, to some degree, growth that comes through collaboration and independent confirmation of techniques. Patents encumber many of the most basic of strategies. Until privacy concerns regarding the building of databases of keystroke biometrics data are resolved, wide adoption of this technology may meet opposition from civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Still, the field of keystroke biometrics holds great promise for creating systems that are both more secure and more usable than their predecessors. Because keystroke biometrics can be collected without the need for special hardware, and because software to perform identification and authentication has shown great potential in this regard, keystroke biometrics may be poised to become a standard method of proving one's identity both online and offline. Keystroke biometrics maintains an advantage over most other biometrics authentication schemes: user acceptance.[32] As users are already accustomed to authenticating themselves through the entry of username and password, the majority of proposed keystroke biometrics methods are completely transparent to users.
Continuing research and commercial activities in the field, and the popularity of the keyboard as the primary input device for applications, ensure that the technology will not fade into history. As the keystroke biometrics field matures, observers should watch for several trends that will indicate when the technology is ready for more widespread adoption:
Whether the use of keystroke biometrics ultimately become a ubiquitous part of the security landscape will be determined not only by how much we trust these systems to uniquely identify individuals and provide a comfortable authentication process, but also by how much we trust systems that collect the immutable piece of ourselves known as a biometrics. |