Privacy-Aware Processing of Biometric Templates by Means of Secure Two-Party Computation

The use of biometric data for person identification and access control is gaining more and more popularity. Handling biometric data, however, requires particular care, since biometric data is indissolubly tied to the identity of the owner hence raising important security and privacy issues. This chapter focuses on the latter, presenting an innovative approach that, by relying on tools borrowed from Secure Two Party Computation (STPC) theory, permits to process the biometric data in encrypted form, thus eliminating any risk that private biometric information is leaked during an identification process. The basic concepts behind STPC are reviewed together with the basic cryptographic primitives needed to achieve privacy-aware processing of biometric data in a STPC context. The two main approaches proposed so far, namely homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits, are discussed and the way such techniques can be used to develop a full biometric matching protocol described. Some general guidelines to be used in the design of a privacy-aware biometric system are given, so as to allow the reader to choose the most appropriate tools depending on the application at hand

A Formal Study of the Privacy Concerns in Biometric-Based Remote Authentication Schemes

With their increasing popularity in cryptosystems, biometrics have attracted more and more attention from the information security community. However, how to handle the relevant privacy concerns remains to be troublesome. In this paper, we propose a novel security model to formalize the privacy concerns in biometric-based remote authentication schemes. Our security model covers a number of practical privacy concerns such as identity privacy and transaction anonymity, which have not been formally considered in the literature. In addition, we propose a general biometric-based remote authentication scheme and prove its security in our security model

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)

A Cloud Authentication Protocol using One-Time Pad

There is a significant increase in the amount of data breaches in corporate servers in the cloud environments. This includes username and password compromise in the cloud and account hijacking, thus leading to severe vulnerabilities of the cloud service provisioning. Traditional authentication schemes rely on the users to use their credentials to gain access to cloud service. However once the credential is compromised, the attacker will gain access to the cloud service easily. This paper proposes a novel scheme that does not require the user to present his credentials, and yet is able to prove ownership of access to the cloud service using a variant of zero-knowledge proof. A challenge-response protocol is devised to authenticate the user, requiring the user to compute a one-time pad (OTP) to authenticate himself to the server without revealing password to the server. A prototype has been implemented to facilitate the authentication of the user when accessing Dropbox, and the experiment results showed that the overhead incurred is insignificant

Authentication Techniques, Client-Side Voting Software, and Secure Platform Mechanisms

Electronic voting is still a hot topic. You can mainly distinguish between three types of electronic voting, namely direct recording electronic voting devices in polling stations, scan based electronic voting systems, and remote electronic voting. In this paper we focus on the last category and in particular we discuss three dimensions that are specific for remote Internet voting. These are voter identification and authentication techniques, client-side voting software used to cast the vote and secure platform mechanisms to overcome vulnerabilities of the client used by the voter to cast her vote. We describe and analyze different implementations of each of these in the context of remote Internet voting, and assess their performance based on usability, security, costs, and maintenance issues. We identify combinations that cannot be applied at the same time and make recommendations for the application of particular implementations for specific types of elections