K-means++ vs. Behavioral Biometrics: One Loop to Rule Them All

Behavioral biometrics, a field that studies patterns in an individual’s unique behavior, has been researched actively as a means of authentication for decades. Recently, it has even been adopted in many real world scenarios. In this paper, we study keystroke dynamics, the most researched of such behavioral biometrics, from the perspective of an adversary. We designed two adversarial agents with a standard accuracy convenience tradeoff: Targeted K-means++, which is an expensive, but extremely effective adversarial agent, and Indiscriminate K-means++, which is slightly less powerful, but adds no overhead cost to the attacker. With Targeted K-means++ we could compromise the security of 40-70% of users within ten tries. In contrast, with Indiscriminate K-means++, the security of 30-50% of users was compromised. Therefore, we conclude that while keystroke dynamics has potential, it is not ready for security critical applications yet. Future keystroke dynamics research should use such adversaries to benchmark the performance of the detection algorithms, and design better algorithms to foil these. Finally, we show that the K-means++ adversarial agent generalizes well to even other types of behavioral biometrics data by applying it on a dataset of touchscreen swipes.