Behavioral Biometrics On The Rise At RSA Conference

RSA CONFERENCE -- San Francisco -- Fingerprints and retinal scans are awfully hard to spoof, but they are static data that could be stolen, and worse yet, they force users to go through another pesky step in the authentication process. These are the problems being solved by behavioral biometrics technology -- or "passive biometrics," as it's called by Israeli start-up Biocatch, which Dark Reading profiled in July.

These new technologies may monitor mouse dynamics, navigation habits, and keystroke dynamics, like the speed you type and the pressure you hit the keys with, gesture dynamics like swipe speed and distance -- all things you do unconsciously which happen to be very unique to you.

Two companies at the RSA conference this week are operating in this space. Another, Toopher, was also scheduled to be in attendance, but was acquired by SalesForce in April.

NuData Security

The goal, as NuData Security marketing director Matthew Reeves explains, is to see "what can we observe, rather than request from people."

In addition to the biometrics, NuData builds profiles based upon what devices a user commonly authenticates from, or what locations they generally operate within; then flags anomalous behavior. 

Recently NuData researchers discovered that by looking for suspicious account creation activity they could predict fraud 15 days before it would happen. Today they announced an updated dashboard to make it easier to identify these suspicious events and prevent the fraud.

BehavioSec

Sweden-based Behaviosec is a device-agnostic solution that continuously monitors and measures mouse, keystroke, and gesture dynamics. When the behavior of the user (or machine) trying to log in does not match the user profile, the tool initiates a second factor of authentication.

BehavioSec has become popular with financial institutions across Scandinavia, including Danske Banke, authenticating tens of millions of users. 

The company is also in phase two of an Active Authentication project with DARPA, that would incorporate the Behaviosec mobile product with the traditional smartcard access controls used within the Department of Defense.