Hacking can now be made useless
Thursday, 19 May 2011, 05:05 IST
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Washington: Hackers can now be discouraged from hacking into user accounts despite having access to passwords, reveals a new Lebanese research. According to the Key-Pattern Analysis (KPA), a new approach developed by the American University of Beirut, the password stolen by hackers can become ineffective. KPA is an attempt to scrutinise the speed with which a user taps the keys as well as measuring the gaps between keystrokes, the beat of their typing. The result can be a biometric profile of the way individual users type in their password. If the biometric profile does not match the user, then the password fails even if it is "correct," reports the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. However, Ravel Jabbour, Wes Masri and Ali El-Hajj at the university point out that a modified keyboard would be inconvenient for an organization or individual, according to a Beruit statement. So, the team instead has incorporated "intra" timing that measures how long each key remains pressed, which gives them the beat of the typing and is a much more robust parameter. The programme gathers information about how the users type in their password by recording the electronic signals from a standard keyboard as keys are pressed and released. The programme then compares the pattern of the password typed with a pre-stored pattern recorded when the account is initially setup. Users would be expected to repeatedly type their password at the log-in registration stage to record a reproducible typing pattern for permitting a log-in.
Source: IANS
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