Towards Privacy-Aware Keyboards

As shown by various studies, the dynamics of typing on a keyboard is characteristic to persons. On the one hand, this may allow for person identification based on keystroke dynamics in various applications. On the other hand, in certain situations, such as chat-based anonymous helplines, web search for sensitive topics, etc., users may not want to reveal their identity. In general, there are various methods to increase the protection of personal data. In this paper, we propose the concept of privacy-aware keyboard, i.e., a keyboard which transmits keyboard events (such as pressing or releasing of a key) with small random delays in order to ensure that the identity of the user is difficult to be inferred from her typing dynamics. We use real-world keystroke dynamics data in order to simulate privacy-aware keyboards with uniformly random delay and Gaussian delay. The experimental results indicate that the proposed techniques may have an important contribution to keeping the anonymity of users.