A master’s student from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology developed a fingerprinting technique that identified gamers from their mouse and keyboard input patterns as part of their thesis. u/Magga_ shared the results of their study on the r/GlobalOffensive subreddit, where they tracked the mouse and keyboard signals from more than a thousand players and then correlated them to each other. Using this technique, they were able to fingerprint unique users and match them to specific accounts, even those that used multiple smurf accounts.

u/Magga_ said that his technique was able to determine unique players 100% of the time from the mouse dataset, while keyboard fingerprinting was able to pick the right player 98% of the time. Since both metrics measure entirely different movements, combining them makes for highly accurate detection. There are concerns that unrelated people could potentially have the same play style, especially as Counter-Strike 2 still has over 1.2 million players at peak, resulting in false positives. However, u/Magga_ said that even though complete strangers can have similar signals for either mouse or keyboard, there’s very low statistical probability that two people would have similar mouse and keyboard habits.

11, where 0 means unrelated and 1 means they always go together,” the researcher wrote. ” But once they investigated deeper, u/Magga_ found out that these accounts were actually related to each other, revealing unknown account pairs and even connecting four different accounts to one person.

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