MAUSPAD: Mouse-based Authentication Using Segmentation-based, Progress-Adjusted DTW

Biometric user authentication is at the core of multifactor authentication, and mouse-based biometric authentication comes at no additional cost for most computer systems. This paper describes a mouse-based user authentication scheme, called MAUSPAD, which uses a novel progress-adjusted dynamic time warping (PADTW) algorithm, along with a segmentation algorithm, to accurately and meaningfully measure the differences between observed data and reference data. By introducing a new concept, which we call progress, into standard DTW, the new PADTW can have better control of the warping and mapping process and hence is more suitable for comparing time-stamped spatial sequences such as mouse cursor movements. Furthermore, in order to preserve the important but transient details in the cursor movement (which may be critical in identifying a specific user), we apply a segmentation algorithm to divide each reference cursor movement into multiple smaller segments, and measure the differences between cursor movements at the segment level. Evaluation results on two mouse-behavior datasets show that MAUSPAD yields the best overall performance among tested schemes, and demonstrate the effectiveness of PADTW over DTW, and segmentation over non-segmentation. The processing techniques developed herein can be extended to applications that rely on sequence comparison, and where relevant sequence information spans multiple semantic domains.