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Securing Account Recovery Mechanism on Desktop Computers and Mobile Phones with Keystroke Dynamics

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Abstract

Account recovery has become a prevalent feature across mobile and web applications that circumvents the regular username/password-based user authentication process, and thus is known to be less secure and fraught with attacks. For example, to trigger the account recovery process, an email or one-time password (OTP) is sent to the user’s registration email and/or phone. This assumes that only the genuine user has access to the email/phone which is not always the case. To further improve the security of the account recovery mechanism, beyond validating the information and other credentials typed by the user, we propose a recovery method with the use of keystrokes dynamics. We evaluated performances using two new keystroke datasets—the first contains over 500,000 keystrokes collected on a desktop computer from 44 participants, while the second 327,000 keystrokes on a touchscreen mobile phone from 39 participants. Both datasets require the participants to fill out an account recovery form of multiple fields. For each dataset, we evaluated the performance of five scoring algorithms on individual fields, feature-level fusion and weighted-score fusion. We also applied one-class classification, a machine learning approach and compared results. For the desktop dataset, we achieved the best equal error rate (EER) of 5.47% for individual fields, 0% for feature-level fusion of five fields, and 0% for weighted-score fusion of seven fields. For the touch-mobile dataset, we achieved the best EER of 10.25% for individual fields, 4.97% for feature-level fusion of four fields and 2.26% for weighted-score fusion of seven fields. Our results show that the application of keystroke dynamics is highly promising to further secure the account recovery mechanism on both desktop and mobile platforms.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) and the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant No. 1650503, NSF Grant No. 1314792, and a grant from the NYSTAR Technology Transfer program (Contract #C180035). Dr. Jiaju Huang designed and collected the original desktop data and performed a preliminary performance investigation in 2018. Aratrika Ray collected the mobile dataset.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clarkson University, Clarkson Avenue, Potsdam, 13699, NY, USA

    Ahmed Anu Wahab, Daqing Hou & Stephanie Schuckers

  2. Mobile Security Group, CVS Health, Aetna, Woonsocket, USA

    Abbie Barbir

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  1. Ahmed Anu Wahab
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This article is part of the topical collection “Information Systems Security and Privacy” guest edited by Steven Furnell and Paolo Mori.

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Wahab, A.A., Hou, D., Schuckers, S. et al. Securing Account Recovery Mechanism on Desktop Computers and Mobile Phones with Keystroke Dynamics. SN COMPUT. SCI. 3, 360 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01245-3

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