Analyzing key-click patterns of PIN input for recognizing VoIP users

Abstract

Malicious intermediaries are able to detect the availability of VoIP conversation flows in a network and observe the IP addresses used by the conversation partners. However, it is insufficient to infer the calling records of a particular user in this way since the linkability between a user and a IP address is uncertain: users may regularly change or share IP addresses. Unfortunately, VoIP flows may contain human-specific features. For example, users sometimes are required to provide Personal identification numbers (PINs) to a voice server for authentication and thus the key-click patterns of entering a PIN can be extracted from VoIP flows for user recognition. We invited 31 subjects to enter 4-digital PINs on a virtual keypad of a popular VoIP user-agent with mouse clicking. Employing machine learning algorithms, we achieved average equal error rates of 10-29% for user verification and a hitting rate up to 65% with a false positive rate around 1% for user classification. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.