What is Keystroke Dynamics

In recent years, many studies have highlighted the unprecedented growth in security threats from multiple and varied sources faced by corporate, as well as governmental organizations. People inside the organization with ready access to confidential or proprietary data can easily violate the organization security policy, maliciously or inadvertently, without being caught. In order to protect their reputation and valuable assets, many organizations take the dramatic but necessary step of deploying and operating employee surveillance and monitoring tools within their network perimeters. In this chapter, we discuss employee surveillance schemes from both technological and legal perspectives. We argue that keystroke dynamics could be used to fight effectively against insider threat, and as such it could play an important role in employee surveillance. We present a keystroke recognition scheme based on free text detection that goes beyond the traditional approach of using keystroke dynamics for authentication or employee performance evaluation, and consider using such information for dynamic user profiling. The generated profiles can be used to identify reliably perpetrators in the event of security breach. Such form of user profiling provides a very effective way of combating insider threat that is less intrusive to individual privacy.