INTRODUCTION
Psychological biometrics authentication systems utilize behavioral and cognitive characteristics unique to individuals for verifying identity. Unlike traditional biometrics like fingerprints or iris scans, psychological biometrics often involve analyzing patterns in behavior, preferences, and responses to certain stimuli. Automatic identification/verification of an individual’s identity based on analyzing his/her biological (biometric) traits is broadly known as biometrics technology. Naturally, people depend on the observed features of the human body such as facial traits, voice, way of walking (gait), signature, etc. These ways are ideal to recognize others because of these characteristics are unique for each person.
TYPES OF BIOMETRICS
- Behavioural Biometrics: These systems analyze patterns in human behavior such as keystroke dynamics, mouse movements, gait analysis, voice patterns, and even signature dynamics. Each person has unique ways of interacting with devices and systems, which can be measured and used for authentication.
- Psychological biometrics: Physiological biometric authentication analyzes an individual’s unique biological markers, such as fingerprints, eye structure and face shape to ensure a match with an existing user profile. These physiological factors are easy to track and highly accurate because they’re difficult for fraudsters to replicate without expensive equipment.
- Cognitive Biometrics: This involves measuring cognitive responses and mental patterns. For instance, how a person solves problems, their decision-making processes, reaction times, and how they respond to certain tasks or questions can be indicative of their identity.
- Emotional Biometrics: Analysis of emotional responses can also be used. For example, facial expressions, speech intonations, and physiological responses (like heart rate or skin conductance) during specific scenarios can help in verifying an individual’s identity.
- Multimodal Systems: Combining multiple psychological and traditional biometric modalities can enhance security and accuracy. For example, a system might use both keystroke dynamics and facial recognition to ensure robust authentication.
Types of Behavioural Biometrics
1.Keystroke Dynamics:
•How It Works: Measures typing patterns including speed, rhythm, and the time between keystrokes.
•Applications: Often used for continuous authentication while a user is typing, adding an extra layer of security to password inputs.
2.Mouse Dynamics:
•How It Works: Tracks the manner in which a user moves the mouse, clicks, and scrolls.
•Applications: Useful in web-based applications where continuous monitoring is required without disrupting the user experience.
3.Gait Analysis:
•How It Works: Analyzes the way a person walks using accelerometers or video analysis.
•Applications: Suitable for environments requiring physical security, like workplaces or airports.
4.Voice Recognition:
•How It Works: Identifies users based on unique voice characteristics, including tone, pitch, and speaking patterns.
•Applications: Commonly used in call centers and voice-activated systems.
5.Cognitive Patterns:
•How It Works: Assesses problem-solving approaches, decision-making patterns, and responses to cognitive tasks.
•Applications: Can be used in high-security environments where precise identity verification is crucial.
6.Emotional Responses:
•How It Works: Monitors physiological and behavioral responses to emotional stimuli, such as changes in facial expressions or voice intonations.
•Applications: Can be integrated into customer service systems to enhance user experience and security.
7.Lip Movement:
How it works: Just as a deaf person can track the lips’ movement to determine what is being said, biometric systems record the activity of the muscles around the mouth to form a pattern of movement. Biometric sensors of this kind often require the user to repeat a password to determine the appropriate lip movements and then grant or deny access based on a comparison with the recorded pattern.
Applications: It can be used to improve the efficiency of security systems and complement such access methods as face recognition, retinal scanning, and fingerprinting.
Pros & Cons of Behavioural Biometrics
Pros:
Individual user set of analyzed behavioural characteristics.
No custom script change is required to perform identification: seamless integration method.
Improves recognition accuracy in multi factor identification systems.
Cons:
Inaccuracies in identification may arise because the user’s behavior is not always constant since they can behave differently in various situations due to fatigue, drunkenness, feeling unwell or trivial haste.
Behavioural biometrics are not yet widely adopted.Requires lots of personal data to determine a user’s standard behavior.
Applications:
– Security: Enhancing security in areas like banking, online transactions, and secure communications.
– Healthcare**: Ensuring the right patient gets the right treatment by verifying identity in medical records and prescription systems.
– Workplace Authentication: Ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive information or locations.
CHALLENGES
Accuracy and Reliability: Psychological states and behaviors can change due to various factors like stress, fatigue, or mood, which might affect the reliability of these systems.
Privacy Concerns: Collecting and analyzing psychological and behavioral data raises significant privacy issues. It is crucial to ensure that data is handled securely and ethically.
Adaptability: Users might need to adapt to systems, which could involve a learning curve. Systems must balance security with user convenience.
Variability: Human behavior can be inconsistent due to factors like stress, fatigue, or environmental changes, which may affect the accuracy of these systems.
Data Privacy: Collecting and storing detailed behavioral and cognitive data raises significant privacy concerns. Ensuring data is handled ethically and securely is paramount.
Implementation Complexity: Developing and integrating psychological biometric systems can be technically challenging and resource-intensive.
Acceptance and Adaptation: Users may need time to adapt to new authentication methods, and there may be resistance due to privacy concerns or unfamiliarity.
Ethical and Legal Considerations
•Consent: Users must be informed and provide consent for the collection and use of their behavioral and cognitive data.
•Data Security: Implementing strong encryption and access controls to protect sensitive data from breaches and misuse.
•Transparency: Organizations should be transparent about how data is collected, used, and stored, and provide users with control over their data.
Conclusion and Future Directions
Securing critical and sensitive systems from being illegally accessed by imposters has been a potential research field. Biometric-based security authentication obtained considerable attention for its accuracy, reliability, universality and permanence etc. This paper overviewed the most conducted physiological biometric authentication techniques. The focus of this work is to briefly present various physiological biometric security methods. The general scenario or mechanism of each technique is introduced. Also, some are exposed to their key advantages, disadvantages and future improvements for each security system. A combination of several biometric security systems is highly recommended for best level of reliability and accuracy. For example, face recognition can be easily combined with fingerprint system to achieve a better performance. Iris scanning is compatible with retina recognition were a high differentiating in person iris/retina features is perfectly obtained. Moreover, transforming such security authentication techniques from traditional practical environments into more flexible ones such as mobile phones can potentially upgrade the integration of the overall system.
•Advanced AI Integration: Leveraging more sophisticated AI techniques to enhance the accuracy and adaptability of psychological biometrics.
•Wearable Technology: Incorporating sensors and wearable devices to capture more detailed and diverse data, such as heart rate variability and movement patterns.
•Adaptive Systems: Developing systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in user behavior and context, providing more resilient and reliable authentication.
Overall, psychological biometrics offer a promising avenue for enhancing security through more personalised and context-aware authentication methods. However, addressing the technical and ethical challenges is vital for their successful implementation.
Author- Ritik Chhibber