Computer Science Security Research Help

[cs200research]

Hello,
We are posting this message to request some help in some keystroke biometric research that our computer science research team at University of Rochester is trying to accomplish. Your participation would greatly help our study of realtime keystroke user authentication methods. Basically we are working on a biometric program that would lock out anyone who was using your computer that does not match your keystroke profile. While this endeavor is still in its research phase, we need participants to run our program to gather information about each participants specific typing style. If you are interested in helping us please go to the following web address for a more in depth explaination of our program and how to participate in our reserach. Thank You for your time and I hope you can help us out. Please post any questions and we will try to respond quickly. Our timeframe for this
research is the following 2 weeks starting today April 17- May 1st.

Here is the link:
http://www.csug.rochester.edu/~pordal/keyboardbiometrics/

CS200 Research Team at University of Rochester
Warren Fong
Peter Ordal
David Lu
David Ganzhorn
Jonathan Norwood

[cszeto]

I'm not sure that this is the best forum for this type of assistance/activity request. Sure, most people would not mind helping in the name of research, but running this keystroke logger is a very high security risk for the intended volunteers. Not that the research group is not trustworthy, but this type of request goes directly against some very basic security fundamentals:

1. No one knows anyone from anyone within the research group.
2. The research group is not local to most folks - out of sight, out of (legal) reach.
3. Installing a key logger is a very huge security compromise to be asked of by strangers.
4. Shouldn't the research group have an ample sampling of potential test participants within their own educational institution?

[cs200research]

Addressing your questions:

Our group is asking for volunteers for research, viewers who do not wish to participate do not have to. If you take a look at the linked website...we have provided many options as to protecting volunteer's privacy. We also do not record who is sending the information in. As for posting in the security forum we chose so because we would like the opinion of security minded people...as the potential for this research is very security oriented. The user base at our school is great...but we would like greater diversity of research data...more is always better. Thank you for your concern but i want to guarantee potential volunteers that we are affiliated with the University of Rochester and the web site and email reference our school and its directors. Please consider volunteering. Thank You again :)

[cszeto]

www.gator.com