On Keystroke Pattern Variability in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Abstract

The paper investigates the impact of network traffic and network characteristics on the effectiveness of keystroke dynamics for continuous and one-time authentication in the remote desktop applications and virtual desktop infrastructure. The context presented in the paper contributes to the area of biometric authentication systems by identifying virtual desktop environment as a specific application domain that uses a keystroke pattern for user verification and identifying at what extent the context influences on permanence and the immunity of the keystroke data which was never studied before. The results showed that the keystroke pattern is not affected by network latency, but standard deviation, jitter, and packet loss have a significant combined impact onto it. It can also be concluded that RDP packets are not prioritized during transmission over the network, and therefore, we can say that any other competing traffic is likely to render keystroke dynamics unusable for continuous authentication during remote access.