By Kate Freeman
Humans aren’t meant to remember passwords with a bunch of pound signs or other nonsensical symbols. Although, cryptic passwords are great for security purposes, they’re not so great for the humans trying to remember them. And we have plenty to remember...
DARPA announced on Monday that it is looking into the feasibility of getting computers to recognize users by the way they type, rather then having to enter a password.
Richard Guidorizzi, DARPA program manager, gave a talk in 2010 called “Beyond Passwords.” He explained that creating passwords that are easy to remember is bad for personal security. He said keystroke identification would make computers adapt to humans, rather than the other way around.
“Active Authentication” as it’s being called, aims to make how you type your identifying feature. The authentication process, Guidorizzi says, would happen in the background while the computer user goes about their business.
Roy Maxion, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, says such a program might recognize the length of time a user presses the keys. Since typing is a motor skill connected to our subconscious, it would be unlikely that someone could impersonate a particular person’s typing pattern.
A study at Pace University showed a similar program that identifies users by keystroke patterns was 99.5% accurate.
The downside of such a program is that it would require continuous monitoring to verify the same person was using the computer.
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1 comments:
Nice article! Thank you!
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