A Multimodal Technique for an Embedded Fingerprint Recognizer in Mobile Payment Systems

The development and the diffusion of distributed systems, directly connected to recent communication technologies, move people towards the era of mobile and ubiquitous systems. Distributed systems make merchant-customer relationships closer and more flexible, using reliable e-commerce technologies. These systems and environments need many distributed access points, for the creation and management of secure identities and for the secure recognition of users. Traditionally, these access points can be made possible by a software system with a main central server. This work proposes the study and implementation of a multimodal technique, based on biometric information, for identity management and personal ubiquitous authentication. The multimodal technique uses both fingerprint micro features (minutiae) and fingerprint macro features (singularity points) for robust user authentication. To strengthen the security level of electronic payment systems, an embedded hardware prototype has been also created: acting as self-contained sensors, it performs the entire authentication process on the same device, so that all critical information (e.g. biometric data, account transactions and cryptographic keys), are managed and stored inside the sensor, without any data transmission. The sensor has been prototyped using the Celoxica RC203E board, achieving fast execution time, low working frequency, and good recognition performance

An Advanced Technique for User Identification Using Partial Fingerprint

User identification is a very interesting and complex task. Invasive biometrics is based on traits uniqueness and immutability over time. In forensic field, fingerprints have always been considered an essential element for personal recognition. The traditional issue is focused on full fingerprint images matching. In this paper an advanced technique for personal recognition based on partial fingerprint is proposed. This system is based on fingerprint local analysis and micro-features, endpoints and bifurcations, extraction. The proposed approach starts from minutiae extraction from a partial fingerprint image and ends with the final matching score between fingerprint pairs. The computation of likelihood ratios in fingerprint identification is computed by trying every possible overlapping of the partial image with complete image. The first experimental results conducted on the PolyU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) free database show an encouraging performance in terms of identification accuracy

Effective Identity Management on Mobile Devices Using Multi-Sensor Measurements

Due to the dramatic increase in popularity of mobile devices in the past decade, sensitive user information is stored and accessed on these devices every day. Securing sensitive data stored and accessed from mobile devices, makes user-identity management a problem of paramount importance. The tension between security and usability renders the task of user-identity verification on mobile devices challenging. Meanwhile, an appropriate identity management approach is missing since most existing technologies for user-identity verification are either one-shot user verification or only work in restricted controlled environments. To solve the aforementioned problems, we investigated and sought approaches from the sensor data generated by human-mobile interactions. The data are collected from the on-board sensors, including voice data from microphone, acceleration data from accelerometer, angular acceleration data from gyroscope, magnetic force data from magnetometer, and multi-touch gesture input data from touchscreen. We studied the feasibility of extracting biometric and behaviour features from the on-board sensor data and how to efficiently employ the features extracted to perform user-identity verification on the smartphone device. Based on the experimental results of the single-sensor modalities, we further investigated how to integrate them with hardware such as fingerprint and Trust Zone to practically fulfill a usable identity management system for both local application and remote services control. User studies and on-device testing sessions were held for privacy and usability evaluation.Computer Science, Department o

Usability analysis of a novel biometric authentication approach for android-based mobile devices

Mobile devices are widely replacing the standard personal computers thanks to their small size and user-friendly use. As a consequence, the amount of information, often confidential, exchanged through these devices is raising. This makes them potential targets of malicious network hackers. The use of simple passwords or PIN are not sufficient to provide a suitable security level for those applications requiring high protection levels on data and services. In this paper a biometric authentication system, as a running Android application, has been developed and implemented on a real mobile device. A system test on real users has been also carried out in order to evaluate the human-machine interaction quality, the recognition accuracy of the proposed technique, and the scheduling latency of the operating system and its degree of acceptance. Several measures, such as system usability, users satisfaction, and tolerable speed for identification, have been carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach

Usability Analysis of a Novel Biometric Authentication Approach for Android-Based Mobile Devices, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2014, nr 4

Mobile devices are widely replacing the standard personal computers thanks to their small size and userfriendly use. As a consequence, the amount of information, often confidential, exchanged through these devices is raising. This makes them potential targets of malicious network hackers. The use of simple passwords or PIN are not sufficient to provide a suitable security level for those applications requiring high protection levels on data and services. In this paper a biometric authentication system, as a running Android application, has been developed and implemented on a real mobile device. A system test on real users has been also carried out in order to evaluate the human-machine interaction quality, the recognition accuracy of the proposed technique, and the scheduling latency of the operating system and its degree of acceptance. Several measures, such as system usability, users satisfaction, and tolerable speed for identification, have been carried out in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach

Embedded Biometric Sensor Devices: Design and Implementation on Field Programmable Gate Array

During the research activity in my Ph.D. course, I thoroughly studied the biometric systems and the relevant design and implementation techniques allowing the employment of such systems in embedded devices. I focused my attention on the fingerprint-based recognition and classification systems, and on their implementation on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. I was prompted to study biometric systems mainly because these systems may play a key role in the new emerging market of mobile devices (for example, they are recently available in the new generation of Apple and Samsung smart phones). Such market is rapidly growing and influencing the way people use network resources and functionalities (such as commercial, banking, and government services), requiring a security level higher than in the past. Consequently, novel design techniques and technologies for user recognition and are required to be investigated, in order to provide a secure services and resources access. The traditional authentication systems based on username and password are not able to guarantee a suitable protection level. Unlike password, instead, user biometric information is unique and unchangeable; therefore the biometric identity has the advantage to guarantee that only the authorized users have access to available resources and services. However, traditional biometric approaches involves interactions among a large number of entities: passive access points for user biometric trait acquisition, networked databases for user biometric identity storing, and trusted servers running the user recognition systems. So, traditional systems usually undergo several types of attacks, such as Communication Attack (attacking the channel between the server and the database), Replay Attack (replication of user biometric trait processed during the acquisition phase), and Database Attack (manipulation of the stored user biometric identity). Embedded architectures, instead, provide a more secure and flexible infrastructure, since all elaboration steps are performed on board, so biometric identities are securely managed and stored inside the system without any data leaking out. The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the analysis and results of my research activity focused on the design and development of new fingerprint-based recognition systems for embedded devices. The study of the state-of-the-art about biometric systems led me to realize novel approaches to improve the performance of standard systems in order to enable their employment in embedded devices architectures. Most common literature approaches used to implement fingerprint-based recognition and classification systems are reported to provide a starting-point for understanding the contribution of this work. There are many literature approaches to deal with software systems, but few on design and implementation of embedded hardware prototypes. Referring to the developed and proposed fingerprint-based systems, this thesis represents an advancement of embedded biometrics respect to state-of-the-art. The step-over proposed in this work is focused on: 1. a heuristic fingerprint classification technique, requiring only a little set of images as training dataset; 2. an advanced matching technique for personal recognition based on partial fingerprint, able to enhance the system accuracy; 3. the design and implementation of an efficient fingerprint features extractor; 4. the design and implementation of a quality evaluator of raw fingerprint images (able to identify poor quality areas, such as dry and moist portions), allowing to define a novel flow of image processing steps for user recognition. This thesis is divided into two parts, creating a path connecting the state-of-the-art about biometric systems and the novel implemented approaches. The knowledge of the state-of-the-art about biometrics is fundamental to understand the step over presented in this work. For this reason, in the first part, general characteristics of biometric systems are presented with particular reference to fingerprint-based approaches used in literature to realize embedded systems. The second part proposes the developed innovative sensor. A novel flow of image processing steps for user recognition is outlined. Successively, an efficient micro and macro fingerprint features extractor is illustrated. Then, an advanced matching technique for personal recognition using partial fingerprints is presented. Finally, an innovative fingerprint classification approach based on the fusion of Fuzzy C-Means and Naive-Bayes technique is detailed. Experimental results and comparisons with analogous literature systems show the effectiveness on the proposed sensor. All the innovative approaches proposed in this thesis have been published in international conferences and journals

Recreating Fingerprint Images by Convolutional Neural Network Autoencoder Architecture

Fingerprint recognition systems have been applied widely to adopt accurate and reliable biometric identification between individuals. Deep learning, especially Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has made a tremendous success in the field of computer vision for pattern recognition. Several approaches have been applied to reconstruct fingerprint images. However, these algorithms encountered problems with various overlapping patterns and poor quality on the images. In this work, a convolutional neural network autoencoder has been used to reconstruct fingerprint images. An autoencoder is a technique, which is able to replicate data in the images. The advantage of convolutional neural networks makes it suitable for feature extraction. Four datasets of fingerprint images have been used to prove the robustness of the proposed architecture. The dataset of fingerprint images has been collected from various real resources. These datasets include a fingerprint verification competition (FVC2004) database, which has been distorted. The proposed approach has been assessed by calculating the cumulative match characteristics (CMC) between the reconstructed and the original features. We obtained promising results of identification rate from four datasets of fingerprints images (Dataset I, Dataset II, Dataset III, Dataset IV) with 98.1%, 97%, 95.9%, and 95.02% respectively by CNN autoencoder. The proposed architecture was tested and compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. The achieved experimental results show that the proposed solution is suitable for recreating a complex context of fingerprinting images

Bio : A Mulrimodal biometric authentication system for person identification and verification

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Bioelectrical User Authentication

There has been tremendous growth of mobile devices, which includes mobile phones, tablets etc. in recent years. The use of mobile phone is more prevalent due to their increasing functionality and capacity. Most of the mobile phones available now are smart phones and better processing capability hence their deployment for processing large volume of information. The information contained in these smart phones need to be protected against unauthorised persons from getting hold of personal data. To verify a legitimate user before accessing the phone information, the user authentication mechanism should be robust enough to meet present security challenge. The present approach for user authentication is cumbersome and fails to consider the human factor. The point of entry mechanism is intrusive which forces users to authenticate always irrespectively of the time interval. The use of biometric is identified as a more reliable method for implementing a transparent and non-intrusive user authentication. Transparent authentication using biometrics provides the opportunity for more convenient and secure authentication over secret-knowledge or token-based approaches. The ability to apply biometrics in a transparent manner improves the authentication security by providing a reliable way for smart phone user authentication. As such, research is required to investigate new modalities that would easily operate within the constraints of a continuous and transparent authentication system. This thesis explores the use of bioelectrical signals and contextual information for non-intrusive approach for authenticating a user of a mobile device. From fusion of bioelectrical signals and context awareness information, three algorithms where created to discriminate subjects with overall Equal Error Rate (EER of 3.4%, 2.04% and 0.27% respectively. Based vii | P a g e on the analysis from the multi-algorithm implementation, a novel architecture is proposed using a multi-algorithm biometric authentication system for authentication a user of a smart phone. The framework is designed to be continuous, transparent with the application of advanced intelligence to further improve the authentication result. With the proposed framework, it removes the inconvenience of password/passphrase etc. memorability, carrying of token or capturing a biometric sample in an intrusive manner. The framework is evaluated through simulation with the application of a voting scheme. The simulation of the voting scheme using majority voting improved to the performance of the combine algorithm (security level 2) to FRR of 22% and FAR of 0%, the Active algorithm (security level 2) to FRR of 14.33% and FAR of 0% while the Non-active algorithm (security level 3) to FRR of 10.33% and FAR of 0%