The protection of computing systems and their users is a critical objective in this Internet era. A common protection mechanism consists of using a password to access your personal computer. Passwords, however, are notoriously insecure. There are several tools on the Internet that allow intruders to easily crack protection mechanisms such as passwords. A good alternative to passwords consists of using biometrics technologies.
Biometrics technology consists of the automated use of a collection of factors describing human behavioral or physiological characteristics to establish or verify a precise identity. Examples of biometrics include finger-scan, iris-scan, retina-scan, hand-scan, and facial-scan and others.
The main objective of this project has been to investigate innovative behavioural biometrics which can be used to authenticate continuously or statically online users. Traditional biometrics technologies such as finger-scan or iris-scan are limited in this respect because they require special purpose hardware for data collection, which may not always be available. The following important milestones have been achieved as part of this research:
We have developed a new biometrics technology, which extracts and analyzes user mouse interactions patterns dubbed mouse dynamics biometric. These patterns are used to establish unique and distinctive profiles for every user. These profiles can be used as a biometrics data in order to protect individual computer users both statically at login time as well as continuously throughout the session;
We have proposed another novel biometric technology for static user authentication that homogeneously combines mouse dynamics, visual search capability and short-term memory effect. The proposed system introduces the visual search capability and short-term memory effect to the biometric-based security world for the first time. The use of mouse for its dynamics, and as an input sensor for the other two biometrics, means no additional hardware is required.
People
- Dr. Issa Traore, Coordinator
- Dr. Ahmed Awad, Investigator
- Dr. Omar Hamdy Mohamed, Investigator
- Mr. Akif Nazar, Investigator
- Mr. Bassam Sayed, Investigator