Abstract: This paper presents a comparative analysis of three different mouse activity data interception techniques in the Windows operating system and studies their impacts on the performance of mouse dynamics based authentication.The differences between three interception techniques were analyzed from perspectives of sampling resolution,timer resolution and position information.A controlled environment for intercepting mouse activity data from multiple users using three interception techniques was designed.The effects of the different techniques were at first studied from the level of mouse activity features.Then an authentication model based on neural networks was established to classify mouse activity data,and the effect of the different interception techniques on the performance of authentication was evaluated.The results show the message hooking technique appears to be a better interception technique achieving an accuracy rate above 94%.