Int. J. Biometrics, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2018 65 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. An authentication system using keystroke dynamics Farhana Javed Zareen, Chirag Matta, Akshay Arora, Sarmod Singh and Suraiya Jabin* Department of Computer Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi-110025, India Email: farhanazareen@yahoo.com Email: chirag1matta@gmail.com Email: akshayaroraofficial@gmail.com Email: baliyansarmod@gmail.com Email: sjabin@jmi.ac.in *Corresponding author Abstract: There are various biometrics-based methods for user authentication. However, the best authentication method can be based on physiological/behavioural biometrics as capturing physiological biometrics may require use of special devices and that may not be available with many users. Keystroke dynamics is a simplified and easily achievable user authentication method when every user is available with a laptop or a personal computer. This paper presents a keystroke dynamics-based authentication system using Bayesian regularised feed-forward neural network. In order to train the model, a database is captured for recording keystroke dynamics of 20 users in four sessions each with 50 samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the Bayesian regularised neural network models provide the best results and are most suitable for this purpose. We are able to achieve an equal error rate of 0.9% which is better than the methods used in the existing literature for plain keystroke dynamics. We have given a comparative analysis of the performance of proposed system with existing methods. Keywords: individual authentication; biometrics; equal error rate; keystroke dynamics; pattern recognition; machine learning. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Zareen, F.J., Matta, C., Arora, A., Singh, S. and Jabin, S. (2018) ‘An authentication system using keystroke dynamics’, Int. J. Biometrics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp.65–76. Biographical notes: Farhana Javed Zareen is currently a PhD Scholar in Department of Computer Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi, India. She received her Bachelor’s degree in 2010 and Master’s degree in 2012 both from Department of Computer Science, Calcutta University, India. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and biometric signature verification. Chirag Matta completed his Master’s in Computer Application (MCA) in 2016 from the Department of Computer Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi, India. He is currently serving as a Software Engineer in Infogain India Pvt. Ltd.