By Os DavisWhen you play poker in an online casino, you can’t see the hackers, the spammers, the bots and the “phishers” lurking in wait to deprive honest players of their payrolls – but they’re out there. Once a player’s identity is stolen via any number of methods (e.g. false email messages supposedly from an online casino requesting account information, deployment of bots, hacking), the perpetrator is at liberty to empty the victim’s account for easy profit.

The good news is that security measures are improving continuously in the still-burgeoning world of online poker; just like the bad guys, these defenders of fair play are also invisible to poker players – but they’re out there.

One innovator in the fight against hackers and phishermen is Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy, an assistant professor in engineering at the University of Louisville. Together with Venu Govindaraju of the University of Buffalo, Yampolskiy has advanced the cause of internal security at online poker rooms with an innovative bit of software which seeks to study and analyze the player’s “gambling DNA.”

It’s not biology that Yamploskiy and Govindaraju are interested in, despite the familiar acronym: Rather, the key to the new software is “biometrics,” a field which seeks to quantify patterns that will assist in identifying individuals based on patterns of behavior.

The Louisville duo is specifically interested in “direct and indirect human-computer interaction (or “HCI”)-based biometrics.In a paper of the same name published in the Journal of Computers in December 2007, Yampolskiy and Govindaraju explained that “Direct HCI biometrics are based on abilities, style, preference, knowledge, or strategy used by people while working with a computer.

The indirect HCI-based biometrics are events that can be obtained by monitoring users’ HCI behavior indirectly via observable low-level actions of computer software.”

The paper goes on to report on “results of our experiments with direct and indirect HCI-based behavioral biometrics employed as a part of an intrusion detection system.”

The following month, the Yamploskiy/Govindaraju team had a primer of sort on biometrical analysis published, appropriately enough, in the first-ever issue of the “International Journal of Biometrics”; the piece included a section on gaming theory alongside more standard milieu from which to measure biometrically.

All academic achievement aside, what rocked the online poker world was the possibility of an actual piece of software that could solve one of internet gambling’s largest security problems.

According to no less a source than “New Scientist,” Yampolskiy and Govindaraju’s software “monitors how you play. It catalogues how often and how much a player tends to bet, increases the bet, [goes all-in], or folds ... This information is bundled up into a personalised measure – the player's "gambling DNA" –that can then be used to confirm their identity.”

Yamploskiyhas claimed that the software can firmly define a player’s “gambling DNA” in one hour to an accuracy of 80% and that this number should gradually approach 100% the more often the player sits down to a round of poker online.

While the knee-jerk reaction is akin to “the better players will adapt styles to be as unpredictable as possible,” one can’t help but figure that Yamploskiy’s software is to be employed mostly in protecting thelower- or middle-level players in the cyberworld.

After all, if you’re *that* good, presumably you’re also capable of protecting your bankroll and/or skilled in avoiding phishing scams and their ilk.It seems, however, that Yamploskiy’s software has yet to be implemented by online casinos and the news trail on the product trails off in 2008 – heck, it appears as though the thing hasn’t even been named yet. If biometric applications are good enough for Department of Homeland Security and even Walt Disney World, they’re certainly the future in the internet poker world.