When Human cognitive modeling meets PINs: User-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel user-independent inter-keystroke timing attack on PINs, leveraging a human cognitive model to predict keystroke timings, significantly improving attack success rates and posing serious security threats.

Contribution

The paper presents the first user-independent attack method based on inter-keystroke timing, using a cognitive model that requires minimal training data, enabling large-scale real-world attacks.

Findings

Attack outperforms random guessing significantly.

Effective across different PIN strength levels.

Presents mitigation strategies for the threat.

Abstract

This paper proposes the first user-independent inter-keystroke timing attacks on PINs. Our attack method is based on an inter-keystroke timing dictionary built from a human cognitive model whose parameters can be determined by a small amount of training data on any users (not necessarily the target victims). Our attacks can thus be potentially launched on a large scale in real-world settings. We investigate inter-keystroke timing attacks in different online attack settings and evaluate their performance on PINs at different strength levels. Our experimental results show that the proposed attack performs significantly better than random guessing attacks. We further demonstrate that our attacks pose a serious threat to real-world applications and propose various ways to mitigate the threat.