Are digraphs good for free-text keystroke dynamics?

Abstract

Research in keystroke dynamics has largely focused on the typing patterns found in fixed text (e.g. userid and passwords). In this regard, digraphs and trigraphs have proven to be discriminative features. Recently, however, there is increasing interest in free-text keystroke dynamics, in which the user to be authenticated is free to type whatever he/she wants, rather than a pre-determined text. The natural question that arises is whether digraphs and trigraphs are just as discriminative for free text as they are for fixed text. We attempt to answer this question in this paper. We show that digraphs and trigraphs, if computed without regard to what word was typed, are no longer discriminative. Instead, word-specific digraphs/trigraphs are required We also show that the typing dynamics for some words depend on whether they are part of a larger word. Our study is the first to investigate these issues, and we hope our work will help guide researchers looking for good features for freetext keystroke dynamics. © 2007 IEEE.