Keystroke Dynamics User Authentication Based on Gaussian Mixture Model and Deep Belief Nets

User authentication using keystroke dynamics offers many advances in the domain of cyber security, including no extra hardware cost, continuous monitoring, and nonintrusiveness. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Here, we introduce two new algorithms to the domain: the Gaussian mixture model with the universal background model (GMM-UBM) and the deep belief nets (DBN). Unlike most existing approaches, which only use genuine users’ data at training time, these two generative model-based approaches leverage data from background users to enhance the model’s discriminative capability without seeing the imposter’s data at training time. These two new algorithms make no assumption about the underlying probability distribution and are fast for training and testing. They can also be extended to free text use cases. Evaluations on the CMU keystroke dynamics benchmark dataset show over 58% reduction in the equal error rate over the best published approaches.