This is something that looks to be pretty promising: keystroke biometric technology. BioPassword is working on such a technology and so far looks to have promising results. It will be very interesting to see if this thing takes off since all computers have the necessary element to make it work: the keyboard.

I remember buzz here at eWEEK Labs some time ago about user authentication based on keystroke cadence. It sounded cool but didn’t seem to take off.

That may soon change.

In March, I spoke with Jared Pfost, a vice president at BioPassword. It turns out that the company that became BioPassword purchased the rights to keystroke biometric technology held by the SRI (Stanford Research Institute) International.

BioPassword is putting that technology into action with its new BioPassword Enterprise Edition 3.0, with optional knowledge-based authentication factors, integration with Citrix Systems’ Citrix Access Gateway Advanced Edition, and Microsoft OWA (Outlook Web Access) and Windows XP embedded thin clients.

What I like about keystroke authentication as a biometric factor is that it uses something that is already built in to every user’s PC: a keyboard. This eliminates the need to, for example, retrofit field-deployed PCs with a fingerprint reader—ditto for laptops—because the keyboard is already deployed.[more]

Tags: Computer Protection, Defense in Depth