Behavioral biometrics

What is behavioral biometrics?

Behavioral biometrics is observing human behavior, click, and browsing movements to verify and confirm a user identity and find out anything suspicious. It could be as simple as analyzing how a user swipes, clicks, or dwells on an application, interface, or any digital device.

When biometrics in general is about verifying a user’s identity based on password or other physical characteristics (fingerprint, iris of the eye, etc), behavioral biometrics goes beyond that, trying to grasp subconscious patterns of a user, that others could never mimic or steal—thus preventing fraud and identity theft on a digital landscape.

Behavioral biometrics answers to questions like:

• How does a user swipe, scroll through, and click on any digital medium.
• Is there any specific pattern they follow while pressing buttons, typing passwords, or dwelling on any section?
• How do they interact with form data and other fields where their input is required? And more like this.

Which sector needs behavioral biometrics?

There are many industries, functional areas, and professions where behavioral biometrics could come in handy, for example, finance, insurance, and banking, eCommerce, healthcare, NGO, government sector, and security teams.

Banking and finance: The growth of fintech, digital banking services, and neobanks invite diverse types of threats and fraud, which could become detrimental to the institutions’ reputation. A simple behavioral biometric check could ensure safety without disrupting user experience. eCommerce and retail: eCommerce deals with fraudulent transactions like bots, fake accounts, and credential stealing, which could be prevented by identifying and matching real user behaviors. Healthcare: Behavioral biometrics protect sensitive data of patients in digital healthcare systems, allowing medical professionals to safely access patient information.
Government portals: National and state-level portals, being accessed by general public, has higher level of chances of data stealing, account swapping, and cyber-attacks. Along with regular biometrics, behavioral biometrics, adds an additional level of security.

How does a behavioral biometric system work?

Data collection: When a new user logs into a system enabled with the behavioral biometrics, it starts observing user interactions, collecting the following information in the background.

• Keyboard strokes, which include typing speed, rhythm, spelling mistake patterns, and more.
• Movement of the mouse, speed, angle at which it’s turned, etc.
• If it’s touchscreen, touches, swipes, pressure applied, etc.
• Phone orientation: how the smart phone or gadget is held, angle, movements, and more.
• Other interaction data like usage time, session timing, etc.

Training the model: The system assigns the collected data to each user, which gets trained by the machine learning models, which will later be represented as the normal behavior of the respective user. Verification of user identity: Every time the same user visits the digital platform; the behavioral biometrics checks and tries to match the browsing behavior. Here is what it does after verification. Continues with the user session if the records match. Redirects the user to the login screen, multi-factor authentication, or any other triggers set.
Risk scoring and decision-making: The validation doesn’t happen in one step. The AI model tries to assess the user behavior and assigns risk score. For low and mid-risk levels, the system may not prompt any action or ask for additional verification. And in case of high-risk levels, the system not just blocks the session, but also escalates it.

Real-world example of behavioral biometrics?

Here's a typical example of how behavioral biometrics work for an online banking system. The normal behavior of a typical user as per the system is fast typing, micro-second breaks in between certain key combinations, checks balances before proceeding with a transaction, typically logs in from a laptop, uses mouse and makes angular movements while scrolling through, and more like this.

The system may flag the user session as fraudulent if the user logs in from a different device or location, uses touchpad, shows fast movements or slow typing. This is one such example of the kind of data that behavioral biometrics could collect and process. However, it’s proven effective across use cases and industries.

Why is behavioral biometrics important?

• It's easier to break a system that has just password or dual authentication security, especially in times where there are plenty of tech advancements and cyber felonies. Behavior biometrics detect these suspicious patterns even before the fraudulent transactions could take place, whether it’s a trained imposter or a cyber bot.
• Identity monitoring and verification goes beyond the login session.
• Users require friction-less ways of security checks and controls; they don’t want to be interrupted nor flagged as false positives, even if it’s for their own security. Behavioral checks fit well here, as they run in background and is never intrusive, unless required.
• Works well with other biometric checks. If you want to strengthen them, it’s very much possible.