Section 11.6. Conclusion


11.6. Conclusion

Although 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.

[32] Gaines et al.

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:

  • Greater depth in performance measurement, with the average study involving at least thousands of users

  • The creation of datasets that can be shared between studies, enabling researchers to focus on perfecting their classification methods instead of burdening them with the task of building usable sample data

  • Introduction of schemes that ensure the privacy of collected biometrics data

  • Expiration or relaxation of existing intellectual property claims, with resultant competition that this will foster

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.



Security and Usability. Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use
Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems That People Can Use
ISBN: 0596008279
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 295

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