Translating a Digital Strategy for South Africa’s Police Services

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become an integral requirement to develop and implement a digital policing strategy for South Africa\u27s Police Services (SAPS) for 2020 and beyond. ICT is vital for transformation to ensure information technology is implemented to revolutionise ailing state departments in South Africa. Information Technology (IS) has become part of everyday life in the twenty first century to transform policing in Europe and the Oceania\u27s, while South Africa has been lagging in creating an enabling policing environment to provide effective and efficient service to manage crime. Phenomenal advances in digital policing have transformed research in Europe and the Oceania\u27s but South Africa have a dearth on research and the impact of ICT service delivery for policing. Current socio-economic and political turmoil and an increase in violent crime is creating uncertainty for the South African economy which has stagnated due to international investment slowing down. South Africa\u27s Police Service (SAPS) is floundering under pressure due to lack of service delivery and bureaucratic leadership. The objectives of this research is to revolutionise SAPS by implementing a digital strategy to achieve the following objectives; a) implement digital technology to transform all aspects of policing using a phased approach; b) provide a wide ranging assessment of police employee challenges relating to recruitment and development, assessment of the current training facilities and education and understanding the use of technology; c) re-engineer policing practices to understand police organisation units focusing on outcomes, and d) promoting relationship between policing and communities by prioritising technology for communication. Prioritising these objectives further research will be required and a strategic plan will be developed and implemented for SAPS creating an enabling work environment to address the surge of crime and make the communities safe for families. In order to achieve these results government should prioritise funding to address policing challenges in dealing with crime effectively, paving the way for a safer and crime free society

Best of Two Worlds: Efficient, Usable and Auditable Biometric ABC on the Blockchain

In [1], two generic constructions for biometric-based non-transferable Attribute Based Credentials (biometric ABC) are presented, which offer different trade-offs between efficiency and trust assumptions. In this paper, we focus on the second scheme denoted as BioABC-ZK that tries to remove the strong (and unrealistic) trust assumption on the Reader R, and show that BioABC-ZK has a security flaw for a colluding R and Verifier V. Besides, BioABC-ZK lacks GDPR-compliance, which requires secure processing of biometrics, for instance in form of Fuzzy Extractors, as opposed to (i) storing the reference biometric template aBio in the user\u27s mobile phone and (ii) processing of biometrics using an external untrusted R, whose foreign manufacturers are unlikely to adjust their products according to GDPR. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we review efficient biometric ABC schemes to identify the privacy-by-design criteria for them. In view of these principles, we propose a new architecture for biometric ABC of [2] by adapting the recently introduced core/helper setting of [3]. Briefly, a user in our modified setting is composed of a constrained core device (a SIM card) inside a helper device (a smart phone with dual SIM and face recognition feature), which -as opposed to [1]- does not need to store aBio. This way, the new design provides Identity Privacy without the need for an external R and/or a dedicated hardware per user such as a biometric smart card reader or a tamper proof smart card as in current hardware-bound credential systems. Besides, the new system maintains minimal hardware requirements on the SIM card -only responsible for storing ABC and helper data-, which results in easy adoption and usability without loosing efficiency, if recently introduced key derivation scheme of [4] and the modified ABC scheme of [2] are employed together. As a result, a total overhead of 500 milliseconds to a showing of a comparable non-biometric ABC is obtained instead of the 2.1 seconds in [1] apart from the removal of computationally expensive pairings. Finally, as different from [1], auditing is achieved via Blockchain instead of proving in zero-knowledge the actual biometric matching by the user to reveal malicious behavior of R and V

Extended Abstracts of the Second Privacy Enhancing Technologies Convention (PET-CON 2008.1)

PET-CON, the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Convention, is a forum for researchers, students, developers, and other interested people to discuss novel research, current developments and techniques in the area of Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET-CON was first conceived in June 2007 at the 7th International PET Symposium in Ottawa, Canada. The idea was to set up a bi-annual convention in or nearby Germany to be able to meet more often than only once a year at some major conference