Show HN: Typing.ai – Secure typing biometrics authentication API (opens in new tab)

Thanks for your questions.

Regarding: "However, this is claiming to authenticate me as an individual. But what if my writing improves? What if I have a mechanical keyboard at work but a rinky-dink iPad case soft keyboard at home?"

You will have to create separate typing signatures in order to cover both desktop and mobile apps, because mobile typing is totally different than the computer's keybord typing. Typing AI is able to identify your device and is able to learn from previous detections.

One of our advantages against the competition is that we're using a machine learning algorithm and the platform learns from previous detections. Thus it will be able to identify you even if you're using a smartphone, a tablet or a desktop computer.

Regarding the 99.9% detection accuracy score, I can confirm that in 2021, Typing AI Biometrics made over 300 000 user identity checks from over 30 000 unique users. When mentioning this score we used our yearly analytics, where 1 in 1000 identity checks was a false positive keystrokes detection.

My bank tried to add typing heuristics on the password box years ago. It wouldn’t lock you out, but you had to go through extra verification steps if you failed. I failed the test pretty much every time I logged in, and I’m sure it happened a lot because 6 months later it was gone. In that use case it was an extra attempt at locking down bank access, which I can appreciate, but I hated that it was wrong most of the time.

Thanks for your questions.

We provide both desktop and mobile support. But you will have different typing signatures in this case, one for mobile and one for desktop usage. The mobile typing is totally different than the computer keyboard typing.

In order to guarantee strong security, we recommend you to use at least 8 characters for the signature (our competitors ask for over 160 characters). You can use an email address, a word, multiple words, a password. The longer your signature text is, the stronger will be the typing ID.

To allow the keystroke detection to work with arbitrary text you will have to submit multiple sentences in order to cover the entire alphabet. This case is also covered, but most of our users are defining the signature texts and they always use that text.

Typing AI is using a machine learning algorithm and it learns from previous detections, this is one of our advantages against the competition, we can easily cover the case described by you: "I'm thinking of authenticating while typing a post/comment somewhere".

The one context where I've seen something like this that I thought was interesting was in an online MOOC. Presumably it would be trivial to give your account credentials to someone else in order to have them pass a quiz/test on the platform for you, or to write our essay. They used something similar to match the typing pattern compared to some other sample that had been taken when identity was verified off-band, so then in subsequent submissions of writing samples in the platform, they could have more confidence that it was submitted by the original student.

In 14 September 2019, Europe adopted the PSD2 payment standard which require banks and fintech's to integrate two factor authentication solutions. The typing biometrics can be integrated with other 2FA methods, increasing it's use and importance.

PSD2 is the second revision of the Payment Service Directive (PSD, 2007), which is aimed at developing the market for electronic payments in the EU. The different measures highlight the opening for other companies to use banks payment services (Open Banking) and two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase security in transactions and prevent online fraud.

You can find more details about PSD2 here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1...