The Horcrux Protocol: A Method for Decentralized Biometric-based Self-sovereign Identity

Most user authentication methods and identity proving systems rely on a centralized database. Such information storage presents a single point of compromise from a security perspective. If this system is compromised it poses a direct threat to users' digital identities. This paper proposes a decentralized authentication method, called the Horcrux protocol, in which there is no such single point of compromise. The protocol relies on decentralized identifiers (DIDs) under development by the W3C Verifiable Claims Community Group and the concept of self-sovereign identity. To accomplish this, we propose specification and implementation of a decentralized biometric credential storage option via blockchains using DIDs and DID documents within the IEEE 2410-2017 Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS)

Web-Based Benchmark for Keystroke Dynamics Biometric Systems: A Statistical Analysis

Most keystroke dynamics studies have been evaluated using a specific kind of dataset in which users type an imposed login and password. Moreover, these studies are optimistics since most of them use different acquisition protocols, private datasets, controlled environment, etc. In order to enhance the accuracy of keystroke dynamics' performance, the main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a new kind of dataset in which users have typed both an imposed and a chosen pairs of logins and passwords. In addition, the keystroke dynamics samples are collected in a web-based uncontrolled environment (OS, keyboards, browser, etc.). Such kind of dataset is important since it provides us more realistic results of keystroke dynamics' performance in comparison to the literature (controlled environment, etc.). Second, we present a statistical analysis of well known assertions such as the relationship between performance and password size, impact of fusion schemes on system overall performance, and others such as the relationship between performance and entropy. We put into obviousness in this paper some new results on keystroke dynamics in realistic conditions.Comment: The Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIHMSP 2012), Piraeus : Greece (2012

EEG-Based Person Authentication Modelling Using Incremental Fuzzy-Rough Nearest Neighbour Technique

High level security has nurtured the arisen of Electroencephalograms (EEG) signals as a noteworthy biometrics modality for person authentication modelling. Modelling distinctive characteristics among individuals, especially in a dynamic environment involves incremental knowledge updates from time to time. K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) is a well-known incremental learning method which applies First-In-First-Out (FIFO) knowledge update strategy. However, it is not suitable for person authentication modelling because it cannot preserve the representative EEG signals patterns when individual characteristics changes over time. Fuzzy-Rough Nearest Neighbours (FRNN) technique is an outstanding technique to model uncertainty under an imperfect data condition. The current implementation of FRNN technique is not designed for incremental learning problem because there is no update function to incrementally reshape and reform the existing knowledge granules. Thus, this research aims to design an Incremental FRNN (IncFRNN) technique for person authentication modelling using feature extracted EEG signals from VEP electrodes. The IncFRNN algorithm updates the training set by employing a heuristic update method to maintain representative objects and eliminate rarely used objects. The IncFRNN algorithm is able to control the size of training pool using predefined window size threshold. EEG signals such as visual evoked potential (VEP) is unique but highly uncertain and difficult to process.There exists no consistant agreement on suitable feature extraction methods and VEP electrodes in the past literature. The experimental comparison in this research has suggested eight significant electrodes set located at the occipital area. Similarly, six feature extraction methods, i.e. Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD), mean of amplitude, coherence, crosscorrelation, hjorth parameter and mutual information were used construct the proposed person authentication model. The correlation-based feature selection (CFS) method was used to select representative WPD vector subset to eliminate redundancy before combining with other features. The electrodes, feature extraction, and feature selection analysis were tested using the benchmarking dataset from UCI repositories. The IncFRNN technique was evaluated using a collected EEG data from 37 subjects. The recorded datasets were designed in three different conditions of ambient noise influence to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. The proposed IncFRNN technique was compared with its predecessor, the FRNN and IBk technique. Accuracy and area under ROC curve (AUC) were used to measure the authentication performance. The IncFRNN technique has achieved promising results. The results have been further validated and proven significant statistically using paired sample ttest and Wilcoxon sign-ranked test. The heuristic incremental update is able to preserve the core set of individual biometrics characteristics through representative EEG signals patterns in person authentication modelling. Future work should focus on the noise management in data acquisition and modelling process to improve the robustness of the proposed person authentication model

Multimodal decision-level fusion for person authentication

In this paper, the use of clustering algorithms for decision-level data fusion is proposed. Person authentication results coming from several modalities (e.g., still image, speech), are combined by using fuzzy k-means (FKM), fuzzy vector quantization (FVQ) algorithms, and median radial basis function (MRBF) network. The quality measure of the modalities data is used for fuzzification. Two modifications of the FKM and FVQ algorithms, based on a novel fuzzy vector distance definition, are proposed to handle the fuzzy data and utilize the quality measure. Simulations show that fuzzy clustering algorithms have better performance compared to the classical clustering algorithms and other known fusion algorithms. MRBF has better performance especially when two modalities are combined. Moreover, the use of the quality via the proposed modified algorithms increases the performance of the fusion system

Deep Neural Network and Data Augmentation Methodology for off-axis iris segmentation in wearable headsets

A data augmentation methodology is presented and applied to generate a large dataset of off-axis iris regions and train a low-complexity deep neural network. Although of low complexity the resulting network achieves a high level of accuracy in iris region segmentation for challenging off-axis eye-patches. Interestingly, this network is also shown to achieve high levels of performance for regular, frontal, segmentation of iris regions, comparing favorably with state-of-the-art techniques of significantly higher complexity. Due to its lower complexity, this network is well suited for deployment in embedded applications such as augmented and mixed reality headsets

Biometric Authentication using Nonparametric Methods

The physiological and behavioral trait is employed to develop biometric authentication systems. The proposed work deals with the authentication of iris and signature based on minimum variance criteria. The iris patterns are preprocessed based on area of the connected components. The segmented image used for authentication consists of the region with large variations in the gray level values. The image region is split into quadtree components. The components with minimum variance are determined from the training samples. Hu moments are applied on the components. The summation of moment values corresponding to minimum variance components are provided as input vector to k-means and fuzzy kmeans classifiers. The best performance was obtained for MMU database consisting of 45 subjects. The number of subjects with zero False Rejection Rate [FRR] was 44 and number of subjects with zero False Acceptance Rate [FAR] was 45. This paper addresses the computational load reduction in off-line signature verification based on minimal features using k-means, fuzzy k-means, k-nn, fuzzy k-nn and novel average-max approaches. FRR of 8.13% and FAR of 10% was achieved using k-nn classifier. The signature is a biometric, where variations in a genuine case, is a natural expectation. In the genuine signature, certain parts of signature vary from one instance to another. The system aims to provide simple, fast and robust system using less number of features when compared to state of art works.Comment: 20 page

Data Behind Mobile Behavioural Biometrics – a Survey

Behavioural biometrics are becoming more and more popular. It is hard to find a sensor that is embedded in a mobile/wearable device, which can’t be exploited to extract behavioural biometric data. In this paper, we investigate data in behavioural biometrics and how this data is used in experiments, especially examining papers that introduce new datasets. We will not examine performance accomplished by the algorithms used since a system’s performance is enormously affected by the data used, its amount and quality. Altogether, 32 papers are examined, assessing how often they are cited, have databases published, what modality data are collected, and how the data is used. We offer a roadmap that should be taken into account when designing behavioural data collection and using collected data. We further look at the General Data Protection Regulation, and its significance to the scientific research in the field of biometrics. It is possible to conclude that there is a need for publicly available datasets with comprehensive experimental protocols, similarly established in facial recognition