Password hardening based on keystroke dynamics

  • Authors:
  • Fabian Monrose;Michael K. Reiter;Susanne Wetzel

  • Affiliations:
  • Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ;Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ;Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ

  • Venue:
  • CCS '99 Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We present a novel approach to improving the security of passwords. In our approach, the legitimate user's typing patterns (e.g., durations of keystrokes, and latencies between keystrokes) are combined with the user's password to generate a hardened password that is convincingly more secure than conventional passwords against both online and offline attackers. In addition, our scheme automatically adapts to gradual changes in a user's typing patterns while maintaining the same hardened password across multiple logins, for use in file encryption or other applications requiring a longterm secret key. Using empirical data and a prototype implementation of our scheme, we give evidence that our approach is viable in practice, in terms of ease of use, improved security, and performance