Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2019

Abstract

This paper proposes the first user-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks on PINs. Our attack method is based on an inter-keystroke timing dictionary built from a human cognitive model whose parameters can be determined by a small amount of training data on any users (not necessarily the target victims). Our attacks can thus be potentially launched on a large scale in real-world settings. We investigate inter-keystroke timing attacks in different online attack settings and evaluate their performance on PINs at different strength levels. Our experimental results show that the proposed attack performs significantly better than random guessing attacks. We further demonstrate that our attacks pose a serious threat to real-world applications and propose various ways to mitigate the threat.

Keywords

Authentication, Human behavior, Human cognitive model, Keystroke dynamics, PIN, Timing attack

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

Computers and Security

Volume

80

First Page

90

Last Page

107

ISSN

0167-4048

Identifier

10.1016/j.cose.2018.09.003

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2018.09.003

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