On the Feasibility of Creating Double-Identity Fingerprints

A double-identity fingerprint is a fake fingerprint created by combining features from two different fingers, so that it has a high chance to be falsely matched with fingerprints from both fingers. This paper studies the feasibility of creating double-identity fingerprints by proposing two possible techniques and evaluating to what extent they may be used to fool the state-of-the-art fingerprint recognition systems. The results of systematic experiments suggest that existing algorithms are highly vulnerable to this specific attack (about 90% chance of success at FAR = 0.1%) and that the fingerprint patterns generated might be realistic enough to fool human examiners

Biometric encryption system for increased security

Security is very important in present day life. In this highly-interconnected world, most of our daily activities are computer based, and the data transactions are protected by passwords. These passwords identify various entities such as bank accounts, mobile phones, etc. People might reuse the same password, or passwords related to an individual that can lead to attacks. Indeed, remembering several passwords can become a tedious task. Biometrics is a science that measures an individual’s physical characteristics in a unique way. Thus, biometrics serves as a method to replace the cumbersome use of complex passwords. Our research uses the features of biometrics to efficiently implement a biometric encryption system with a high level of security

Multibiometric security in wireless communication systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 05/08/2010.This thesis has aimed to explore an application of Multibiometrics to secured wireless communications. The medium of study for this purpose included Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMAX, over which simulations and experimental studies were carried out to assess the performance. In specific, restriction of access to authorized users only is provided by a technique referred to hereafter as multibiometric cryptosystem. In brief, the system is built upon a complete challenge/response methodology in order to obtain a high level of security on the basis of user identification by fingerprint and further confirmation by verification of the user through text-dependent speaker recognition. First is the enrolment phase by which the database of watermarked fingerprints with memorable texts along with the voice features, based on the same texts, is created by sending them to the server through wireless channel. Later is the verification stage at which claimed users, ones who claim are genuine, are verified against the database, and it consists of five steps. Initially faced by the identification level, one is asked to first present one’s fingerprint and a memorable word, former is watermarked into latter, in order for system to authenticate the fingerprint and verify the validity of it by retrieving the challenge for accepted user. The following three steps then involve speaker recognition including the user responding to the challenge by text-dependent voice, server authenticating the response, and finally server accepting/rejecting the user. In order to implement fingerprint watermarking, i.e. incorporating the memorable word as a watermark message into the fingerprint image, an algorithm of five steps has been developed. The first three novel steps having to do with the fingerprint image enhancement (CLAHE with 'Clip Limit', standard deviation analysis and sliding neighborhood) have been followed with further two steps for embedding, and extracting the watermark into the enhanced fingerprint image utilising Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In the speaker recognition stage, the limitations of this technique in wireless communication have been addressed by sending voice feature (cepstral coefficients) instead of raw sample. This scheme is to reap the advantages of reducing the transmission time and dependency of the data on communication channel, together with no loss of packet. Finally, the obtained results have verified the claims

Textural features for fingerprint liveness detection

The main topic ofmy research during these three years concerned biometrics and in particular the Fingerprint Liveness Detection (FLD), namely the recognition of fake fingerprints. Fingerprints spoofing is a topical issue as evidenced by the release of the latest iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models with an embedded fingerprint reader as an alternative to passwords. Several videos posted on YouTube show how to violate these devices by using fake fingerprints which demonstrated how the problemof vulnerability to spoofing constitutes a threat to the existing fingerprint recognition systems. Despite the fact that many algorithms have been proposed so far, none of them showed the ability to clearly discriminate between real and fake fingertips. In my work, after a study of the state-of-the-art I paid a special attention on the so called textural algorithms. I first used the LBP (Local Binary Pattern) algorithm and then I worked on the introduction of the LPQ (Local Phase Quantization) and the BSIF (Binarized Statistical Image Features) algorithms in the FLD field. In the last two years I worked especially on what we called the “user specific” problem. In the extracted features we noticed the presence of characteristic related not only to the liveness but also to the different users. We have been able to improve the obtained results identifying and removing, at least partially, this user specific characteristic. Since 2009 the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Cagliari and theDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the ClarksonUniversity have organized the Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet). I have been involved in the organization of both second and third editions of the Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet 2011 and LivDet 2013) and I am currently involved in the acquisition of live and fake fingerprint that will be inserted in three of the LivDet 2015 datasets

Novel active sweat pores based liveness detection techniques for fingerprint biometrics

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Liveness detection in automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) is an issue which still prevents its use in many unsupervised security applications. In the last decade, various hardware and software solutions for the detection of liveness from fingerprints have been proposed by academic research groups. However, the proposed methods have not yet been practically implemented with existing AFIS. A large amount of research is needed before commercial AFIS can be implemented. In this research, novel active pore based liveness detection methods were proposed for AFIS. These novel methods are based on the detection of active pores on fingertip ridges, and the measurement of ionic activity in the sweat fluid that appears at the openings of active pores. The literature is critically reviewed in terms of liveness detection issues. Existing fingerprint technology, and hardware and software solutions proposed for liveness detection are also examined. A comparative study has been completed on the commercially and specifically collected fingerprint databases, and it was concluded that images in these datasets do not contained any visible evidence of liveness. They were used to test various algorithms developed for liveness detection; however, to implement proper liveness detection in fingerprint systems a new database with fine details of fingertips is needed. Therefore a new high resolution Brunel Fingerprint Biometric Database (B-FBDB) was captured and collected for this novel liveness detection research. The first proposed novel liveness detection method is a High Pass Correlation Filtering Algorithm (HCFA). This image processing algorithm has been developed in Matlab and tested on B-FBDB dataset images. The results of the HCFA algorithm have proved the idea behind the research, as they successfully demonstrated the clear possibility of liveness detection by active pore detection from high resolution images. The second novel liveness detection method is based on the experimental evidence. This method explains liveness detection by measuring the ionic activities above the sample of ionic sweat fluid. A Micro Needle Electrode (MNE) based setup was used in this experiment to measure the ionic activities. In results, 5.9 pC to 6.5 pC charges were detected with ten NME positions (50μm to 360 μm) above the surface of ionic sweat fluid. These measurements are also a proof of liveness from active fingertip pores, and this technique can be used in the future to implement liveness detection solutions. The interaction of NME and ionic fluid was modelled in COMSOL multiphysics, and the effect of electric field variations on NME was recorded at 5μm -360μm positions above the ionic fluid.This study is funded by the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan

Handgrip pattern recognition

There are numerous tragic gun deaths each year. Making handguns safer by personalizing them could prevent most such tragedies. Personalized handguns, also called smart guns, are handguns that can only be fired by the authorized user. Handgrip pattern recognition holds great promise in the development of the smart gun. Two algorithms, static analysis algorithm and dynamic analysis algorithm, were developed to find the patterns of a person about how to grasp a handgun. The static analysis algorithm measured 160 subjects\u27 fingertip placements on the replica gun handle. The cluster analysis and discriminant analysis were applied to these fingertip placements, and a classification tree was built to find the fingertip pattern for each subject. The dynamic analysis algorithm collected and measured 24 subjects\u27 handgrip pressure waveforms during the trigger pulling stage. A handgrip recognition algorithm was developed to find the correct pattern. A DSP box was built to make the handgrip pattern recognition to be done in real time. A real gun was used to evaluate the handgrip recognition algorithm. The result was shown and it proves that such a handgrip recognition system works well as a prototype

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

Deep Learning based Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection: A Comprehensive Survey

The vulnerabilities of fingerprint authentication systems have raised security concerns when adapting them to highly secure access-control applications. Therefore, Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection (FPAD) methods are essential for ensuring reliable fingerprint authentication. Owing to the lack of generation capacity of traditional handcrafted based approaches, deep learning-based FPAD has become mainstream and has achieved remarkable performance in the past decade. Existing reviews have focused more on hand-cratfed rather than deep learning-based methods, which are outdated. To stimulate future research, we will concentrate only on recent deep-learning-based FPAD methods. In this paper, we first briefly introduce the most common Presentation Attack Instruments (PAIs) and publicly available fingerprint Presentation Attack (PA) datasets. We then describe the existing deep-learning FPAD by categorizing them into contact, contactless, and smartphone-based approaches. Finally, we conclude the paper by discussing the open challenges at the current stage and emphasizing the potential future perspective.Comment: 29 pages, submitted to ACM computing survey journa

A Fingerprint Matching Model using Unsupervised Learning Approach

The increase in the number of interconnected information systems and networks to the Internet has led to an increase in different security threats and violations such as unauthorised remote access. The existing network technologies and communication protocols are not well designed to deal with such problems. The recent explosive development in the Internet allowed unwelcomed visitors to gain access to private information and various resources such as financial institutions, hospitals, airports ... etc. Those resources comprise critical-mission systems and information which rely on certain techniques to achieve effective security. With the increasing use of IT technologies for managing information, there is a need for stronger authentication mechanisms such as biometrics which is expected to take over many of traditional authentication and identification solutions. Providing appropriate authentication and identification mechanisms such as biometrics not only ensures that the right users have access to resources and giving them the right privileges, but enables cybercrime forensics specialists to gather useful evidence whenever needed. Also, critical-mission resources and applications require mechanisms to detect when legitimate users try to misuse their privileges; certainly biometrics helps to provide such services. This paper investigates the field of biometrics as one of the recent developed mechanisms for user authentication and evidence gathering despite its limitations. A biometric-based solution model is proposed using various statistical-based unsupervised learning approaches for fingerprint matching. The proposed matching algorithm is based on three various similarity measures, Cosine similarity measure, Manhattan distance measure and Chebyshev distance measure. In this paper, we introduce a model which uses those similarity measures to compute a fingerprint’s matching factor. The calculated matching factor is based on a certain threshold value which could be used by a forensic specialist for deciding whether a suspicious user is actually the person who claims to be or not. A freely available fingerprint biometric SDK has been used to develop and implement the suggested algorithm. The major findings of the experiments showed promising and interesting results in terms of the performance of all the proposed similarity measures.Final Accepted Versio