Privacy: Gone with the Typing! Identifying Web Users by Their Typing Patterns

Prima Chairunnanda, Nam Pham, Urs Hengartner

Abstract: The lack of privacy protection for Internet users has been identified as a major problem in modern web browsers. While authenticating web users by their typing patterns has been well studied and successfully applied in practice, the related privacy risk of identification by typing patterns has received little attention in both the research and general community. In this paper we present a simple but effective statistical detection model for constructing users' identity from their typing patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted to justify the accuracy of our model. Using this model, online adversaries could uncover the identity of Web users even if they are using anonym zing services. Our goal is to raise awareness of this privacy risk to general Internet users and encourage countermeasures in future implementations of anonymous browsing techniques.