Secure Pick Up: Implicit Authentication When You Start Using the Smartphone

We propose Secure Pick Up (SPU), a convenient, lightweight, in-device, non-intrusive and automatic-learning system for smartphone user authentication. Operating in the background, our system implicitly observes users' phone pick-up movements, the way they bend their arms when they pick up a smartphone to interact with the device, to authenticate the users. Our SPU outperforms the state-of-the-art implicit authentication mechanisms in three main aspects: 1) SPU automatically learns the user's behavioral pattern without requiring a large amount of training data (especially those of other users) as previous methods did, making it more deployable. Towards this end, we propose a weighted multi-dimensional Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm to effectively quantify similarities between users' pick-up movements; 2) SPU does not rely on a remote server for providing further computational power, making SPU efficient and usable even without network access; and 3) our system can adaptively update a user's authentication model to accommodate user's behavioral drift over time with negligible overhead. Through extensive experiments on real world datasets, we demonstrate that SPU can achieve authentication accuracy up to 96.3% with a very low latency of 2.4 milliseconds. It reduces the number of times a user has to do explicit authentication by 32.9%, while effectively defending against various attacks.Comment: Published on ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT) 201

The ear as a biometric

It is more than 10 years since the first tentative experiments in ear biometrics were conducted and it has now reached the “adolescence” of its development towards a mature biometric. Here we present a timely retrospective of the ensuing research since those early days. Whilst its detailed structure may not be as complex as the iris, we show that the ear has unique security advantages over other biometrics. It is most unusual, even unique, in that it supports not only visual and forensic recognition, but also acoustic recognition at the same time. This, together with its deep three-dimensional structure and its robust resistance to change with age will make it very difficult to counterfeit thus ensuring that the ear will occupy a special place in situations requiring a high degree of protection

Formal Analysis of Vulnerabilities of Web Applications Based on SQL Injection (Extended Version)

We present a formal approach that exploits attacks related to SQL Injection (SQLi) searching for security flaws in a web application. We give a formal representation of web applications and databases, and show that our formalization effectively exploits SQLi attacks. We implemented our approach in a prototype tool called SQLfast and we show its efficiency on real-world case studies, including the discovery of an attack on Joomla! that no other tool can find

Optimizing Anti-Phishing Solutions Based on User Awareness, Education and the Use of the Latest Web Security Solutions

Phishing has grown significantly in volume over the time, becoming the most usual web threat today. The present economic crisis is an added argument for the great increase in number of attempts to cheat internet users, both businesses and private ones. The present research is aimed at helping the IT environment get a more precise view over the phishing attacks in Romania; in order to achieve this goal we have designed an application able to retrieve and interpret phishing related data from five other trusted web sources and compile them into a meaningful and more targeted report. As a conclusion, besides making available regular reports, we underline the need for a higher degree of awareness related to this issue.Security, Phishing, Ev-SSL, Security Solutions