Behavioral biometrics for DARPA's Active Authentication program

The aim of the US Defense Advance Research Project Agency's (DARPA) Active Authentication program is the continuous authentication of users by using behavioral biometrics authentication systems, which does not depend on specific hardware or sensors. This paper presents how such a continuous authentication system would perform in an office like environment. The analysis is performed on a data set captured from 99 users over a 10 week period. Our continuous authentication system builds a behavior biometric profile of the user by observing mouse movement, keystrokes and application usage. The user is then actively matched against his profile. The goal was, as DARPA is mentioning in their Active Authentication program, “This means the system would, potentially have to falsely reject the user more than five times in a row during continuous usage over a 40 hour period to fail to meet this target. The technologies developed under this solicitation should be able to work invisibly to the user unless five false positives are reached”. The results of our study indicate that the correct user can work through a regular workday without being falsely rejected, while the incorrect user would be detected within 18 seconds using keyboard or 2.4 minutes using mouse. Application process usage results show that the incorrect user would be detected in just over 1.5 minutes.