Exploring visual representations of computer mouse movements for bot detection using deep learning approaches

Abstract

Nowadays, bots can be seen everywhere on the Internet and are responsible for a large percentage of website traffic. The problem of bot detection has increasingly gained attention since more and more bots have been abused from click fraud in online advertisements to launching credential stuffing attacks for harvesting user accounts at a large scale. In this work, we present an end-to-end deep framework for bot detection based on computer mouse movements. Specifically, we propose a novel visual representation scheme that can simultaneously encode spatial and kinematic information in mouse movements into an image which can then be used as the input to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Various strategies to encode kinematic features into images are investigated to obtain a better scheme of visual representation. Experimental results show that the proposed representation scheme in combination with CNN outperforms several baseline models with a TPR of 99.34% in detecting known bots and can be generalized to unknown bots with a highest accuracy of 99.20%. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach can reach acceptable performance levels even for models trained with a small number of training samples. This makes the deployment of our approach easier in real-world scenarios.