When Human cognitive modeling meets PINs: User-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks

This paper proposes the first user-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks on PINs. Our attack method is based on an inter-keystroke timing dictionary built from a human cognitive model whose parameters can be determined by a small amount of training data on any users (not necessarily the target...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: LIU, Ximing, LI, Yingjiu, DENG, Robert H., CHANG, Bing, LI, Shujun
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
Subjects:
PIN
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4153
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5157/viewcontent/Human_Cognitive_Model_PINS_2019_01.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:This paper proposes the first user-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks on PINs. Our attack method is based on an inter-keystroke timing dictionary built from a human cognitive model whose parameters can be determined by a small amount of training data on any users (not necessarily the target victims). Our attacks can thus be potentially launched on a large scale in real-world settings. We investigate inter-keystroke timing attacks in different online attack settings and evaluate their performance on PINs at different strength levels. Our experimental results show that the proposed attack performs significantly better than random guessing attacks. We further demonstrate that our attacks pose a serious threat to real-world applications and propose various ways to mitigate the threat.