DARPA's Active Authentication - Now Forgetting Passwords Won't Upset You

The way we do user identity validation today involves all of us to remember complicated passwords. Right from creating them to managing them (read keeping them from being compromised ) is a process full of irritating inconvenience. Moreover, after going through all this, there is no guarantee that in an active session, the user originally authenticated is the user still in control of the keyboard. Quite dreadful, eh? Now, DARPA's Active Authentication mechanism is about to render unnecessary these passwords. So, you can do away with those sticky notes on your refrigerator.



DARPA's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - Content not found program aims at finding innovative ways of validating user identity using software based biometrics. Basically, they are trying to capture the usage traits of a person and identify each individual uniquely based on these traits. This technology, that DARPA is working on, will make use of 'cognitive fingerprint', which is a pattern that gets created depending upon how our minds process information. The Biometrics research will revolve on and around how the user handles the mouse and how the user crafts written language in an e-mail or document.

For this research, data patterns of keystrokes from hundreds of users were collected and when verified they found that more than 99% of the time, the users were correctly identified. But, this system is flawed because a very large sample of data is required from each user and if there is a change in the user, the system can't detect it. So, as a part of the solution, DARPA will try to use multiple metrics so that a fingerprint-like unique profile gets created. Check out DARPA's Program Manager Richard Guidorizzi give an overview of Active Authorization in this video -