Ever heard about behaviometrics?

The word derives from the terms “behavioral” and “biometrics”. “Behavioral” refers to the way a human person behaves and “biometrics”, in an information security context, refers to technologies and methods that measure and analyze biological characteristics of the human body for authentication purposes - for example fingerprints, eye retina, DNA and voice patterns. In other words behaviometrics, or behavioral biometrics, is a measurable behavior used to recognize or verify the identity of a person.

All of us have unique patterns to interact with computers through the components mouse, keyboard and graphical user interface. On the one hand we can find the biometric components like the way we move the mouse or the way we type the words. On the other hand we find social and psychological components like if we write in our native language or not. Simply spoken it is nearly impossible to copy or imitate another person`s interaction with the computer. In the behaviometric approach no passwords are used.

Therefore behaviometrics opens for new security solutions for example by identifying the correct user of a bank account on the internet. The probability to identify the right user is astonishingly high –almost 97%! Whereas behaviometrics is a relatively new technique biometrics is already widely used today. Biometric passports with fingerprints are accepted in most European countries and in the US, Brazil and Australia. Iris recognition is a method of biometric authentication that uses pattern-recognition techniques based on high-resolution images of the irides of a person`s eyes.

There are usually two stages for using a biometric in authentication: In the first stage, a person is enrolled. i.e., his unique features with respect to the biometric being used are extracted and a feature set is created for that user which is stored in a template file for him. The next phase is verification where the user later tries to log in to whatever system he wanted access to. Here again the user’s parameters are measured with respect to the biometric. Then a unique feature set is determined and a comparison is done with the template file of the user. If they match, the user is verified to be the authentic user.