Patent ID: 7206938

Claim:
A method of providing security to keyboard based systems, by recognizing patterns of typing by a subject for identity confirmation, comprising the steps of: defining at least one statistical relevance criterion that will qualify certain keystrokes in a group of keystrokes typed by a subject as a mini-rhythm; defining at least one enrollment phase criterion to indicate when text entered in an enrollment phase qualifies as meeting enrollment phase requirements: requiring a subject to enter an enrollment phase, in which subject enters sample text at a keyboard; sensing characteristics of sample text keystroke actions made when subject enters said sample text; storing a plurality of sample text keystroke characteristic data in memory; analyzing said plurality of sample text keystroke characteristic data against said statistical relevance criteria to identify if one or more groupings of sample text keystroke actions qualifies as a mini-rhythm and selectively using only mini-rhythm data from said sample text; analyzing said mini-rhythm data to verify that said enrollment phase criteria have been met; storing said mini-rhythms in memory as identified mini-rhythms unique to said subject; defining at least one criterion for acceptance of validation mini-rhythm recognition; requiring a subject to enter a validation phase subsequent to said enrollment phase, in which said subject enters validation text by keyboard, analyzing a plurality of validation text keystroke characteristic data against said at least one criterion for acceptance of validation phase mini-rhythms to see sufficient correlation exists between the validation phase mini-rhythms and the identified mini-rhythms; returning an acceptance rating indicative of the degree of recognition indicated by the correlation between the validation phase mini-rhythms and the identified mini-rhythms; and building a mini-rhythm array comprised of a plurality of records, in which each record in said array is comprised of dwell and flight times of said characters in said sample text, and said records form columns, with each column being flight or dwell times for the same character in said sample text, from different entries of said sample text.