Keystroke Analysis as a Tool for Intrusion Detection

Background

Identifying users through the way they type on a keyboard is difficult, because keystrokes convey little information: just the time when keys are depressed and released. It is true that special keyboards may allow to measure additional features such as the acceleration or the energy impressed to the keystrokes, but such keyboards are normally not available, and are expensive. Moreover, recent sophisticated devices may use virtual keyboards where only digraph latency and keystroke duration could be easily monitored.