Continuous authentication with cognition-centric text production and revision features

Most continuous user authentication techniques based on typing behavior rely on the keystroke dynamics or on the linguistic style of the user. However, there is a rich spectrum of cognition-centric behavioral traits that a typist exhibits during different stages of text production (e.g., composition, translation, and revision), which to our knowledge, have not been considered for continuous authentication. We study the continuous authentication performance of 123 behavioral traits extracted from discrete cognitive units called bursts. We performed experiments on typing data collected from 486 volunteer subjects. Our findings include: (1) features from bursts delimited by pause events have significantly higher availability and authentication performance compared to bursts delimited by revision events; (2) bursts with pause durations of at least one second provide the best authentication accuracy and availability; and (3) fusing our features with traditional keystroke dynamics features reduced authentication error rates. We achieved an equal error rate between 13.37 and 4.55 percent for authentication windows as low as 30 seconds to 3.5 minutes.