Use of a Novel Keypad Biometric for Enhanced User Identity Verification

In everyday life many actions are secured and/or authenticated by use of a secret personal identification number (PIN). This paper reports an improvement to the security afforded by a numeric PIN system through the addition of a covert biometric identification process. This biometric identification process is achieved through the use of a modified keypad incorporating force sensors within the individual keys, these sensors permit the dynamic measurement of applied force and key-press timings, providing an advantage over existing keystroke dynamic techniques which rely on time-domain information only. Details of the experimental setup used are given, and the results from initial tests are reported. In these tests an equal error rate of approximately 10% is obtained and a false acceptance rate of15% with a corresponding false rejection rate of0% has been shown.