Biometric Technologies for Online Student Authentication

In this work we present: i) an analysis of biometric technologies for online student authentication; ii) a case study on keystroke dynamics authentication applied to a real operational environment. Concisely, this work studies the biometric technologies and their advantages/disadvantages for online student authentication services. The analysis is made on the basis of three main pillars: performance, usability and legal concerns. Our study provides new insights on the deployment of these technologies in educational environments with special attention to keystroke dynamics systems. Keystroke dynamic authentication has attracted much interest from industry and researchers during the last decade. Keystroke dynamics authentication is interesting for online authentication because it is: i) transparent (it runs in the background without requiring explicit user interaction); ii) continuous (authentication can be performed over all the user activity, not only based on an initial access to the platform). This work includes a case study on keystroke dynamic authentication over the typing patterns of 64 students answering questions in 3 online exams over a semester. We analyze the performance of four keystroke biometric systems and the results obtained show a promising performance with a correct student authentication over 90%. This work encourages to further explore in authentication services based on biometric technologies for online courses.