Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

A practical index for approximate dictionary matching with few mismatches

Approximate dictionary matching is a classic string matching problem (checking if a query string occurs in a collection of strings) with applications in, e.g., spellchecking, online catalogs, geolocation, and web searchers. We present a surprisingly simple solution called a split index, which is based on the Dirichlet principle, for matching a keyword with few mismatches, and experimentally show that it offers competitive space-time tradeoffs. Our implementation in the C++ language is focused mostly on data compaction, which is beneficial for the search speed (e.g., by being cache friendly). We compare our solution with other algorithms and we show that it performs better for the Hamming distance. Query times in the order of 1 microsecond were reported for one mismatch for the dictionary size of a few megabytes on a medium-end PC. We also demonstrate that a basic compression technique consisting in $q$-gram substitution can significantly reduce the index size (up to 50% of the input text size for the DNA), while still keeping the query time relatively low

Multimodal Biometrics Enhancement Recognition System based on Fusion of Fingerprint and PalmPrint: A Review

This article is an overview of a current multimodal biometrics research based on fingerprint and palm-print. It explains the pervious study for each modal separately and its fusion technique with another biometric modal. The basic biometric system consists of four stages: firstly, the sensor which is used for enrolmen

Information Theoretic Methods For Biometrics, Clustering, And Stemmatology

This thesis consists of four parts, three of which study issues related to theories and applications of biometric systems, and one which focuses on clustering. We establish an information theoretic framework and the fundamental trade-off between utility of biometric systems and security of biometric systems. The utility includes person identification and secret binding, while template protection, privacy, and secrecy leakage are security issues addressed. A general model of biometric systems is proposed, in which secret binding and the use of passwords are incorporated. The system model captures major biometric system designs including biometric cryptosystems, cancelable biometrics, secret binding and secret generating systems, and salt biometric systems. In addition to attacks at the database, information leakage from communication links between sensor modules and databases is considered. A general information theoretic rate outer bound is derived for characterizing and comparing the fundamental capacity, and security risks and benefits of different system designs. We establish connections between linear codes to biometric systems, so that one can directly use a vast literature of coding theories of various noise and source random processes to achieve good performance in biometric systems. We develop two biometrics based on laser Doppler vibrometry: LDV) signals and electrocardiogram: ECG) signals. For both cases, changes in statistics of biometric traits of the same individual is the major challenge which obstructs many methods from producing satisfactory results. We propose a ii robust feature selection method that specifically accounts for changes in statistics. The method yields the best results both in LDV and ECG biometrics in terms of equal error rates in authentication scenarios. Finally, we address a different kind of learning problem from data called clustering. Instead of having a set of training data with true labels known as in identification problems, we study the problem of grouping data points without labels given, and its application to computational stemmatology. Since the problem itself has no true answer, the problem is in general ill-posed unless some regularization or norm is set to define the quality of a partition. We propose the use of minimum description length: MDL) principle for graphical based clustering. In the MDL framework, each data partitioning is viewed as a description of the data points, and the description that minimizes the total amount of bits to describe the data points and the model itself is considered the best model. We show that in synthesized data the MDL clustering works well and fits natural intuition of how data should be clustered. Furthermore, we developed a computational stemmatology method based on MDL, which achieves the best performance level in a large dataset

A hyprid technique for human footprint recognition

Biometrics has concerned a great care recently due to its important in the life that starts from civil applications to security and recently terrorism. A Footprint recognition is one of the personal identifications based on biometric measurements.  The aim of this research is to design a proper and reliable biometric system for human footprint recognition named (FRBS) that stands for Footprint Recognition Biometric System. In addition, to construct a human footprint database which it is very helpful for various use in scientific application e.g. for authentication. There exist many biometrics databases for other identity but very rare for footprint. As well as the existing one are very limited. This paper presents a robust hyprid techniques which merges between Image Processing with Artificial Intelligent technique via Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to recognize human footprint.  (ACO) plays the essential role that rise the performance and the quality of the results in the biometric system via feature selection. The set of the selected features was treated as exploratory information, and selects the optimum feature set in standings of feature set size. Life RGB footprint images from nine persons with ten images per person constructed from life visual dataset. At first, the visual dataset was pre-processed operations. Each resultant image detects footprint that is cropped to portions represented by three blocks. The first block is for fingers, the second block refers to the center of the foot and the last one determines the heel. Then features were extracted from each image and stored in Excel file to be entered to Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm. The experimental outcomes of the system show that the proposed algorithm evaluates optimal results with smaller feature set comparing with other algorithms. Experimental outcomes show that our algorithm obtains an efficient and accurate result about 100% accuracy in comparison with other researches on the same field

A digital circuit for extracting singular points from fingerprint images

Since singular point extraction plays an important role in many fingerprint recognition systems, a digital circuit to implement such processing is presented herein. A novel algorithm that combines hardware efficiency with precision in the extraction of the points has been developed. The circuit architecture contains three main building blocks to carry out the three main stages of the algorithm: extraction of a partitioned directional image, smoothing, and searching for the patterns associated with singular points. The circuit processes the pixels in a serial way, following a pipeline scheme and executing in parallel several operations. The design flow employed has been supported by CAD tools. It starts with high-level descriptions and ends with the hardware prototyping into a FPGA from Xilinx

A Survey of Wearable Biometric Recognition Systems

The growing popularity of wearable devices is leading to new ways to interact with the environment, with other smart devices, and with other people. Wearables equipped with an array of sensors are able to capture the owner’s physiological and behavioural traits, thus are well suited for biometric authentication to control other devices or access digital services. However, wearable biometrics have substantial differences from traditional biometrics for computer systems, such as fingerprints, eye features, or voice. In this article, we discuss these differences and analyse how researchers are approaching the wearable biometrics field. We review and provide a categorization of wearable sensors useful for capturing biometric signals. We analyse the computational cost of the different signal processing techniques, an important practical factor in constrained devices such as wearables. Finally, we review and classify the most recent proposals in the field of wearable biometrics in terms of the structure of the biometric system proposed, their experimental setup, and their results. We also present a critique of experimental issues such as evaluation and feasibility aspects, and offer some final thoughts on research directions that need attention in future work

Security and privacy in smart city: a secure e-voting system based on blockchain

In recent years, the internet of things (IoT) growth has brought about many technological changes, including the emergence of the notion of the smart city. The development of a smart city requires the integration of IoT devices and information and communication technologies to improve the quality of lives of citizens in many areas such as health, economy, business, agriculture, and transport. However, with this evolution, many cybersecurity risks and challenges have been raised, so it is necessary to develop these technologies in a protected way to avoid being compromised by attackers. Blockchain, being a new technology based on cryptographic principles, can play an important role in securing smart cities. In this survey, we discussed different applications of blockchain technology in smart cities and also studied how blockchain features (transparency, democracy, decentralization, and security) can help in the improvement of smart city services. This analysis will help us to implement an electronic voting model using a smart contract based on the Ethereum blockchain to highlight how blockchain technology can be implemented in smart cities to promote security