Aswad Tariq and team win Best Paper at SACMAT for a web study of behavioural biometrics
Two master’s alumni and Professor Urs Hengartner examined 232 scripts from 18 vendors to ask whether the tracking protects or invades customers.
Aswad Tariq (MMath ’25), Alexandru Bara (MMath ’25) and Professor Urs Hengartner of the Cheriton School of Computer Science won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT). Tariq is the lead author.
Their paper studies behavioural biometrics, which analyze patterns such as typing speed, keystroke dynamics and mouse movements to help detect fraud. They ask whether the technology protects customers or invades their privacy, noting that some of the domains involved already appear on public blocklists.
It is the first large-scale study of how widely the technology is used on the web. The team assembled 232 behavioural biometric scripts from 18 vendors, developed a crawler called LoginGPT to find login pages containing them, and used static taint analysis and supervised machine learning to separate authentication from tracking. Hengartner says it is concerning that data is sometimes sent to third parties.
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