Multimodal Biometric Systems for Personal Identification and Authentication using Machine and Deep Learning Classifiers

Multimodal biometrics, using machine and deep learning, has recently gained interest over single biometric modalities. This interest stems from the fact that this technique improves recognition and, thus, provides more security. In fact, by combining the abilities of single biometrics, the fusion of two or more biometric modalities creates a robust recognition system that is resistant to the flaws of individual modalities. However, the excellent recognition of multimodal systems depends on multiple factors, such as the fusion scheme, fusion technique, feature extraction techniques, and classification method. In machine learning, existing works generally use different algorithms for feature extraction of modalities, which makes the system more complex. On the other hand, deep learning, with its ability to extract features automatically, has made recognition more efficient and accurate. Studies deploying deep learning algorithms in multimodal biometric systems tried to find a good compromise between the false acceptance and the false rejection rates (FAR and FRR) to choose the threshold in the matching step. This manual choice is not optimal and depends on the expertise of the solution designer, hence the need to automatize this step. From this perspective, the second part of this thesis details an end-to-end CNN algorithm with an automatic matching mechanism. This thesis has conducted two studies on face and iris multimodal biometric recognition. The first study proposes a new feature extraction technique for biometric systems based on machine learning. The iris and facial features extraction is performed using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) combined with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Merging the relevant characteristics of the two modalities is used to create a pattern for an individual in the dataset. The experimental results show the robustness of our proposed technique and the efficiency when using the same feature extraction technique for both modalities. The proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art and gave an accuracy of 98.90%. The second study proposes a deep learning approach using DensNet121 and FaceNet for iris and faces multimodal recognition using feature-level fusion and a new automatic matching technique. The proposed automatic matching approach does not use the threshold to ensure a better compromise between performance and FAR and FRR errors. However, it uses a trained multilayer perceptron (MLP) model that allows people’s automatic classification into two classes: recognized and unrecognized. This platform ensures an accurate and fully automatic process of multimodal recognition. The results obtained by the DenseNet121-FaceNet model by adopting feature-level fusion and automatic matching are very satisfactory. The proposed deep learning models give 99.78% of accuracy, and 99.56% of precision, with 0.22% of FRR and without FAR errors. The proposed and developed platform solutions in this thesis were tested and vali- dated in two different case studies, the central pharmacy of Al-Asria Eye Clinic in Dubai and the Abu Dhabi Police General Headquarters (Police GHQ). The solution allows fast identification of the persons authorized to access the different rooms. It thus protects the pharmacy against any medication abuse and the red zone in the military zone against the unauthorized use of weapons

Biometrics & [and] Security:Combining Fingerprints, Smart Cards and Cryptography

Since the beginning of this brand new century, and especially since the 2001 Sept 11 events in the U.S, several biometric technologies are considered mature enough to be a new tool for security. Generally associated to a personal device for privacy protection, biometric references are stored in secured electronic devices such as smart cards, and systems are using cryptographic tools to communicate with the smart card and securely exchange biometric data. After a general introduction about biometrics, smart cards and cryptography, a second part will introduce our work with fake finger attacks on fingerprint sensors and tests done with different materials. The third part will present our approach for a lightweight fingerprint recognition algorithm for smart cards. The fourth part will detail security protocols used in different applications such as Personal Identity Verification cards. We will discuss our implementation such as the one we developed for the NIST to be used in PIV smart cards. Finally, a fifth part will address Cryptography-Biometrics interaction. We will highlight the antagonism between Cryptography – determinism, stable data – and Biometrics – statistical, error-prone –. Then we will present our application of challenge-response protocol to biometric data for easing the fingerprint recognition process

A Survey on Modality Characteristics, Performance Evaluation Metrics, and Security for Traditional and Wearable Biometric Systems

Biometric research is directed increasingly towards Wearable Biometric Systems (WBS) for user authentication and identification. However, prior to engaging in WBS research, how their operational dynamics and design considerations differ from those of Traditional Biometric Systems (TBS) must be understood. While the current literature is cognizant of those differences, there is no effective work that summarizes the factors where TBS and WBS differ, namely, their modality characteristics, performance, security and privacy. To bridge the gap, this paper accordingly reviews and compares the key characteristics of modalities, contrasts the metrics used to evaluate system performance, and highlights the divergence in critical vulnerabilities, attacks and defenses for TBS and WBS. It further discusses how these factors affect the design considerations for WBS, the open challenges and future directions of research in these areas. In doing so, the paper provides a big-picture overview of the important avenues of challenges and potential solutions that researchers entering the field should be aware of. Hence, this survey aims to be a starting point for researchers in comprehending the fundamental differences between TBS and WBS before understanding the core challenges associated with WBS and its design

De-identification for privacy protection in multimedia content : A survey

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Slobodan Ribaric, Aladdin Ariyaeeinia, and Nikola Pavesic, ‘De-identification for privacy protection in multimedia content: A survey’, Signal Processing: Image Communication, Vol. 47, pp. 131-151, September 2016, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.image.2016.05.020. This manuscript version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License CC BY NC-ND 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Privacy is one of the most important social and political issues in our information society, characterized by a growing range of enabling and supporting technologies and services. Amongst these are communications, multimedia, biometrics, big data, cloud computing, data mining, internet, social networks, and audio-video surveillance. Each of these can potentially provide the means for privacy intrusion. De-identification is one of the main approaches to privacy protection in multimedia contents (text, still images, audio and video sequences and their combinations). It is a process for concealing or removing personal identifiers, or replacing them by surrogate personal identifiers in personal information in order to prevent the disclosure and use of data for purposes unrelated to the purpose for which the information was originally obtained. Based on the proposed taxonomy inspired by the Safe Harbour approach, the personal identifiers, i.e., the personal identifiable information, are classified as non-biometric, physiological and behavioural biometric, and soft biometric identifiers. In order to protect the privacy of an individual, all of the above identifiers will have to be de-identified in multimedia content. This paper presents a review of the concepts of privacy and the linkage among privacy, privacy protection, and the methods and technologies designed specifically for privacy protection in multimedia contents. The study provides an overview of de-identification approaches for non-biometric identifiers (text, hairstyle, dressing style, license plates), as well as for the physiological (face, fingerprint, iris, ear), behavioural (voice, gait, gesture) and soft-biometric (body silhouette, gender, age, race, tattoo) identifiers in multimedia documents.Peer reviewe

Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future

The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses, organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security, the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics. We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.Comment: Author's copy of the book published under ISBN: 978-620-4-74421-

Securing Cloud Storage by Transparent Biometric Cryptography

With the capability of storing huge volumes of data over the Internet, cloud storage has become a popular and desirable service for individuals and enterprises. The security issues, nevertheless, have been the intense debate within the cloud community. Significant attacks can be taken place, the most common being guessing the (poor) passwords. Given weaknesses with verification credentials, malicious attacks have happened across a variety of well-known storage services (i.e. Dropbox and Google Drive) – resulting in loss the privacy and confidentiality of files. Whilst today's use of third-party cryptographic applications can independently encrypt data, it arguably places a significant burden upon the user in terms of manually ciphering/deciphering each file and administering numerous keys in addition to the login password. The field of biometric cryptography applies biometric modalities within cryptography to produce robust bio-crypto keys without having to remember them. There are, nonetheless, still specific flaws associated with the security of the established bio-crypto key and its usability. Users currently should present their biometric modalities intrusively each time a file needs to be encrypted/decrypted – thus leading to cumbersomeness and inconvenience while throughout usage. Transparent biometrics seeks to eliminate the explicit interaction for verification and thereby remove the user inconvenience. However, the application of transparent biometric within bio-cryptography can increase the variability of the biometric sample leading to further challenges on reproducing the bio-crypto key. An innovative bio-cryptographic approach is developed to non-intrusively encrypt/decrypt data by a bio-crypto key established from transparent biometrics on the fly without storing it somewhere using a backpropagation neural network. This approach seeks to handle the shortcomings of the password login, and concurrently removes the usability issues of the third-party cryptographic applications – thus enabling a more secure and usable user-oriented level of encryption to reinforce the security controls within cloud-based storage. The challenge represents the ability of the innovative bio-cryptographic approach to generate a reproducible bio-crypto key by selective transparent biometric modalities including fingerprint, face and keystrokes which are inherently noisier than their traditional counterparts. Accordingly, sets of experiments using functional and practical datasets reflecting a transparent and unconstrained sample collection are conducted to determine the reliability of creating a non-intrusive and repeatable bio-crypto key of a 256-bit length. With numerous samples being acquired in a non-intrusive fashion, the system would be spontaneously able to capture 6 samples within minute window of time. There is a possibility then to trade-off the false rejection against the false acceptance to tackle the high error, as long as the correct key can be generated via at least one successful sample. As such, the experiments demonstrate that a correct key can be generated to the genuine user once a minute and the average FAR was 0.9%, 0.06%, and 0.06% for fingerprint, face, and keystrokes respectively. For further reinforcing the effectiveness of the key generation approach, other sets of experiments are also implemented to determine what impact the multibiometric approach would have upon the performance at the feature phase versus the matching phase. Holistically, the multibiometric key generation approach demonstrates the superiority in generating the bio-crypto key of a 256-bit in comparison with the single biometric approach. In particular, the feature-level fusion outperforms the matching-level fusion at producing the valid correct key with limited illegitimacy attempts in compromising it – 0.02% FAR rate overall. Accordingly, the thesis proposes an innovative bio-cryptosystem architecture by which cloud-independent encryption is provided to protect the users' personal data in a more reliable and usable fashion using non-intrusive multimodal biometrics.Higher Committee of Education Development in Iraq (HCED

Perceiving is Believing. Authentication with Behavioural and Cognitive Factors

Most computer users have experienced login problems such as, forgetting passwords, loosing token cards and authentication dongles, failing that complicated screen pattern once again, as well as, interaction difficulties in usability. Facing the difficulties of non-flexible strong authentication solutions, users tend to react with poor acceptance or to relax the assumed correct use of authentication procedures and devices, rendering the intended security useless. Biometrics can, sort of, solve some of those problems. However, despite the vast research, there is no perfect solution into designing a secure strong authentication procedure, falling into a trade off between intrusiveness, effectiveness, contextual adequacy and security guarantees. Taking advantage of new technology, recent research onmulti-modal, behavioural and cognitive oriented authentication proposals have sought to optimize trade off towards precision and convenience, reducing intrusiveness for the same amount of security. But these solutions also fall short with respect to different scenarios. Users perform currently multiple authentications everyday, through multiple devices, in panoply of different situations, involving different resources and diverse usage contexts, with no "better authentication solution" for all possible purposes. The proposed framework enhances the recent research in user authentication services with a broader view on the problems involving each solution, towards an usable secure authentication methodology combining and exploring the strengths of each method. It will than be used to prototype instances of new dynamic multifactor models (including novel models of behavioural and cognitive biometrics), materializing the PiB (perceiving is believing) authentication. Ultimately we show how the proposed framework can be smoothly integrated in applications and other authentication services and protocols, namely in the context of SSO Authentication Services and OAuth

A Fingerprint Image Encryption Scheme Based on Hyperchaotic Rössler Map

Currently, biometric identifiers have been used to identify or authenticate users in a biometric system to increase the security in access control systems. Nevertheless, there are several attacks on the biometric system to steal and recover the user’s biometric trait. One of the most powerful attacks is extracting the fingerprint pattern when it is transmitted over communication lines between modules. In this paper, we present a novel fingerprint image encryption scheme based on hyperchaotic Rössler map to provide high security and secrecy in user’s biometric trait, avoid identity theft, and increase the robustness of the biometric system. A complete security analysis is presented to justify the secrecy of the biometric trait by using our proposed scheme at statistical level with 100% of NPCR, low correlation, and uniform histograms. Therefore, it can be used in secure biometric access control systems