Behavioral biometric verification of student identity in online course assessment and authentication of authors in literary works

Keystroke and stylometry behavioral biometrics were investigated with the objective of developing a robust system to authenticate students taking online examinations. This work responds to the 2008 U.S. Higher Education Opportunity Act that requires institutions of higher learning undertake greater access control efforts, by adopting identification technologies as they become available, to assure that students of record are those actually accessing the systems and taking the exams in online courses. Performance statistics on keystroke, stylometry, and combined keystroke-stylometry systems were obtained on data from 30 students taking examinations in a university course. The performance of the keystroke system was 99.96% and 100.00%, while that of the stylometry system was considerably weaker at 74% and 78%, on test input of 500 and 1000 words, respectively. To further investigate the stylometry system, a separate study on 30 book authors achieved performance of 88.2% and 91.5% on samples of 5000 and 10000 words, respectively, and the varied performance over the population of authors was analyzed.