A new mechanism for textual password hardening using adopted typing rhythm

Abstract

This paper presents a novel mechanism for hardening textual passwords using an adopted password keying rhythm. The proposed mechanism uses the adopted rhythm of keying a password along with the password itself for authenticating users. This approach is distinguished from other related approaches in that the user in our approach is required to select a certain password keying pattern during registration and needs to repeat the same keying pattern at the sign-in time. The adopted password style is recorded as a series of discrete symbols that correspond to the length of the elapsed time between two consecutive keystrokes (latency time) of password characters. This time is classified as either S for slow or F for fast based on a certain threshold value. Two approaches are introduced for deciding on a threshold value: global and local. The global approach depends on the collective behaviors of users while the local one may have a unique threshold value for every user. An empirical mechanism is proposed for selecting a global threshold value that can be used to classify latency times. Moreover, a local threshold value is also introduced. The empirical results indicate that the proposed mechanism is effective in terms of hardening textual passwords. The initial results show that both local and global approaches perform similarly. However, the local approach is recommended for classifying latency times.