On mouse dynamics as a behavioral biometric for authentication

Abstract

The idea of using one's behavior with a pointing device, such as a mouse or a touchpad, as a behavioral biometric for authentication purposes has gained increasing attention over the past decade. A number of interesting approaches based on the idea have emerged in the literature and promising experimental results have been reported; however, we argue that limitations in the past experimental evaluations of these approaches raise questions about their true effectiveness in a practical setting. In this paper, we review existing authentication approaches based on mouse dynamics and shed light on some important limitations regarding how the effectiveness of these approaches has been evaluated in the past. We present the results of several experiments that we conducted to illustrate our observations and suggest guidelines for evaluating future authentication approaches based on mouse dynamics. We also discuss a number of avenues for additional research that we believe are necessary to advance the state of the art in this area.