Hey guys, I just found out that I'm a semifinalist in Google International Online Science Fair! Thats top 60 out of like 7,500 projects. Right now theres a People's Choice award contest on, with the reward being a $10K scholarship! Can I get some votes from you guys? Just takes a second, vote here!
For anybody interested in the experiment itself, here's a summary of what I did:
Basically, my goal was to use the natural rhythms of people's keystrokes as a means of identification. You may have heard that each person has an individual fingerprint. In a similar manner, each person has their own individual typing speed, especially when typing something as familiar to them as a password. So just as you could tell two people apart by looking at their fingerprint, you can do it by looking at their typing rhythm. My project uses this to distinguish between legitimate owners of an account and impostors.
Benefits of this system include:
Increased resistance to hacking; brute-force algorithms take 1000x longer
No expensive equipment or hassle, just install software (unlike, for example, fingerprint scanners)
No risk of password being stolen by an observer
So basically I wrote a Java app to collect typing data from a bunch of people. Then I analyzed the 'rhythm' in two different ways, and looked to see which was better. The first time I used the time in between keystrokes as the deciding factor, the other time I looked at the amount of time each key is held down for. I got an average of 98% accuracy using the first method and 95% using the second; so great success, but I concluded there is no difference between the two methods.
Any questions just ask, I'll be happy to respond!
Thanks in advance!