Abstract or Summary:
Verifying the identity of a computer user has not changed much since the earliest days of interactive computing. With limited exceptions, userid and password have dominated, occasionally supplemented with a secondary factor. We propose an alternative approach to continuous user authenticate in an interactive system based on the composition of behavioral authentication techniques. We outline what we refer to as syntropic authentication, where multiple behavioral authentication techniques are composed to produce an overall score about whether the claimed identity is the user of the system. We examine continuous authentication in the context of a user using a desktop/laptop computer, although the approach can be applied to mobile, augmented reality, and other computing environments. A syntropic authentication system complements other kinds of authentication, including traditional and biometric authentication techniques.