Abstract
Purpose Nowadays, there is a high demand for online services and applications. However, there is a challenge to keep these applications secured by applying different methods rather than using the traditional approaches such as passwords and usernames. Keystroke dynamics is one of the alternative authentication methods that provide high level of security in which the used keyboard plays an important role in the recognition accuracy. To guarantee the robustness of a system in different practical situations, there is a need to examine how much the performance of the system is affected by changing the keyboard layout. This paper aims to investigate the impact of using different keyboards on the recognition accuracy for Arabic free-text typing. Design/methodology/approach To evaluate how much the performance of the system is affected by changing the keyboard layout, an experimental study is conducted by using two different keyboards which are a Mac's keyboard and an HP's keyboard. Findings By using the Mac's keyboard, the results showed that the false rejection rate (FRR) was 0.20, whilst the false acceptance rate (FAR) was 0.44. However, these values have changed when using the HP's keyboard where the FRR was equal to 0.08 and the FAR was equal to 0.60. Research limitations/implications - The number of participants in the experiment, as the authors were targeting much more participants. Originality/value These results showed for the first time the impact of the keyboards on the system's performance regarding the recognition accuracy when using Arabic free-text.