Keypress biometrics for user validation in mobile consumer devices

A growing reliance upon mobile consumer devices over recent years has widened the gap between the degree of user trust in such devices and the level of information security that they provide. Foremost is the issue of theft: more expensive and technologically advanced devices are more likely to be stolen, smaller devices are more likely to be lost - and yet paradoxically both classes lead to greater adoption, and thus greater trust by users. Biometric information has long been promoted as a solution to many of the authentication and security needs in module consumer devices, and yet biometric sensors increase cost, size, weight, consume battery power and can reduce ease of use. Keypress biometrics, which includes typing biometrics, a technique that has seen much research but little adoption over the past decade, is ideally suited to mobile consumer devices such as mobile telephones due to its potential low implementation overheads. This paper considers keypress biometrics for such cases and presents a low-complexity statistical approach to the implementation of the method within an embedded system.