THaW’s article about Zero-Effort Bilateral Recurring Authentication (ZEBRA) triggered a lot of press coverage: such as Communications of the ACM (CACM), VICE Motherboard, Dartmouth Now, Gizmag, The Register UK, Planet Biometrics*, Computer Business Review*,  Fierce Health IT, Daily Science News, Senior Tech Insider, Motherboard, Homeland Security Newswire, and NFC World. They’re all intrigued by ZEBRA’s ability to continuously authenticate the user of a desktop terminal and to log them out if they leave or if someone else steps in to use the keyboard. Some(*) mistakenly believe our ZEBRA method uses biometrics; quite the contrary, ZEBRA is designed to be user-agnostic and thus requires no per-user training period. (ZEBRA correlates the bracelet wearer’s movements with the keyboard and mouse movements, not with a prior model of the wearer’s movements as do methods built on behavioral biometrics.)  ZEBRA could be combined with a biometric authentication of the wearer to the bracelet, and can be combined with other methods of initial authentication of wearer to system (such as username/password, or fingerprints) making it an extremely versatile tool that adds strength to existing approaches. The Dartmouth THaW team continues to refine ZEBRA. [Note: since the time this paper was published we have learned of a relevant trademark on the name “Zebra”. Thus, we have renamed our approach “BRACE” and will use that name in future publications.]

Our experiments used the Shimmer research device, though in principle it could work with any fitness band.