EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF AUTHENTICATION ALGORITHMS BASED ON KEYSTROKE DYNAMICS USED IN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL PLATFORMS

The field of education had noticeable challenges regarding in 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic the authorities have introduced new regulations with reference to education. A decisive number of universities have had to adapt to the unfamiliar circumstances, moving all their activities to the online environment. These limitations have led to an unprecedented leap in online education. Suddenly, both teachers and students were forced by the newly implemented conditions to move their entire activity to online educational platforms and thus continue their courses in this manner. This process has led to a development of the e-learning section. This unforeseen change brought a series of challenges, one of which we have focused on in this paper: how to supervise students during an exam session, considering that each one is physically in a different place. To emphasize one method that partially solves the problem of identifying the students that are attending the exams, the paper focused on the method of continuous authentication based on keystroke dynamics, the unique way of pressing the keys while a student writing the subject of the exam. This paper presents the state of scientific research in the field of keystroke dynamics and focuses on the methods of evaluating the performance of authentication algorithms based on keystroke dynamics in online educational platforms. Also, an analysis of the evolution of the MOOC phenomenon is made and the evolution of the main platforms is presented. The MOOC phenomenon (Massive Open Online Courses), courses attended by a large number of students from any corner of the world online, was born in 2008. This phenomenon reached a first maximum in 2012, and in 2020 there was an exponential increase in the number of students enrolled. These increases justify research which is concerned with the success with which users are identified in an online education system, such as the present.