Fast and Secure Linear Regression and Biometric Authentication with Security Update

We explicitly present a homomorphic encryption scheme with a flexible encoding of plaintexts. We prove its security under the LWE assumption, and innovatively show how the scheme can be used to handle computations over both binary strings and real numbers. In addition, using the scheme and its features, we build fast and secure systems of - linear regression using gradient descent, namely finding a reasonable linear relation between data items which remain encrypted. Compared to the best previous work over a simulated dataset of $10^8$ records each with 20 features, our system dramatically reduces the server running time from about 8.75 hours (of the previous work) to only about 10 minutes. - biometric authentication, in which we show how to reduce ciphertext sizes by half and to do the computation at the server very fast, compared with the state-of-the-art. Moreover, as key rotation is a vital task in practice and is recommended by many authorized organizations for key management, - we show how to do key rotation over encrypted data, without any decryption involved, and yet homomorphic properties of ciphertexts remain unchanged. In addition, our method of doing key rotation handles keys of different security levels (e.g., 80- and 128-bit securities), so that the security of ciphertexts and keys in our scheme can be updated , namely can be changed into a higher security level

Implicit Smartphone User Authentication with Sensors and Contextual Machine Learning

Authentication of smartphone users is important because a lot of sensitive data is stored in the smartphone and the smartphone is also used to access various cloud data and services. However, smartphones are easily stolen or co-opted by an attacker. Beyond the initial login, it is highly desirable to re-authenticate end-users who are continuing to access security-critical services and data. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication system for implicit, continuous authentication of the smartphone user based on behavioral characteristics, by leveraging the sensors already ubiquitously built into smartphones. We propose novel context-based authentication models to differentiate the legitimate smartphone owner versus other users. We systematically show how to achieve high authentication accuracy with different design alternatives in sensor and feature selection, machine learning techniques, context detection and multiple devices. Our system can achieve excellent authentication performance with 98.1% accuracy with negligible system overhead and less than 2.4% battery consumption.Comment: Published on the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.0352

Biometric Backdoors: A Poisoning Attack Against Unsupervised Template Updating

In this work, we investigate the concept of biometric backdoors: a template poisoning attack on biometric systems that allows adversaries to stealthily and effortlessly impersonate users in the long-term by exploiting the template update procedure. We show that such attacks can be carried out even by attackers with physical limitations (no digital access to the sensor) and zero knowledge of training data (they know neither decision boundaries nor user template). Based on the adversaries' own templates, they craft several intermediate samples that incrementally bridge the distance between their own template and the legitimate user's. As these adversarial samples are added to the template, the attacker is eventually accepted alongside the legitimate user. To avoid detection, we design the attack to minimize the number of rejected samples. We design our method to cope with the weak assumptions for the attacker and we evaluate the effectiveness of this approach on state-of-the-art face recognition pipelines based on deep neural networks. We find that in scenarios where the deep network is known, adversaries can successfully carry out the attack over 70% of cases with less than ten injection attempts. Even in black-box scenarios, we find that exploiting the transferability of adversarial samples from surrogate models can lead to successful attacks in around 15% of cases. Finally, we design a poisoning detection technique that leverages the consistent directionality of template updates in feature space to discriminate between legitimate and malicious updates. We evaluate such a countermeasure with a set of intra-user variability factors which may present the same directionality characteristics, obtaining equal error rates for the detection between 7-14% and leading to over 99% of attacks being detected after only two sample injections.Comment: 12 page

Privacy-aware Security Applications in the Era of Internet of Things

In this dissertation, we introduce several novel privacy-aware security applications. We split these contributions into three main categories: First, to strengthen the current authentication mechanisms, we designed two novel privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication mechanisms, Continuous Authentication (CA) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). Our first system is Wearable-assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA), where we used the sensor data collected from a wrist-worn device to authenticate users continuously. Then, we improved WACA by integrating a noise-tolerant template matching technique called NTT-Sec to make it privacy-aware as the collected data can be sensitive. We also designed a novel, lightweight, Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication (PACA) protocol. PACA is easily applicable to other biometric authentication mechanisms when feature vectors are represented as fixed-length real-valued vectors. In addition to CA, we also introduced a privacy-aware multi-factor authentication method, called PINTA. In PINTA, we used fuzzy hashing and homomorphic encryption mechanisms to protect the users\u27 sensitive profiles while providing privacy-preserving authentication. For the second privacy-aware contribution, we designed a multi-stage privacy attack to smart home users using the wireless network traffic generated during the communication of the devices. The attack works even on the encrypted data as it is only using the metadata of the network traffic. Moreover, we also designed a novel solution based on the generation of spoofed traffic. Finally, we introduced two privacy-aware secure data exchange mechanisms, which allow sharing the data between multiple parties (e.g., companies, hospitals) while preserving the privacy of the individual in the dataset. These mechanisms were realized with the combination of Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) and Differential Privacy (DP) techniques. In addition, we designed a policy language, called Curie Policy Language (CPL), to handle the conflicting relationships among parties. The novel methods, attacks, and countermeasures in this dissertation were verified with theoretical analysis and extensive experiments with real devices and users. We believe that the research in this dissertation has far-reaching implications on privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication methods, smart home user privacy research, as well as the privacy-aware and secure data exchange methods

Active Authentication using an Autoencoder regularized CNN-based One-Class Classifier

Active authentication refers to the process in which users are unobtrusively monitored and authenticated continuously throughout their interactions with mobile devices. Generally, an active authentication problem is modelled as a one class classification problem due to the unavailability of data from the impostor users. Normally, the enrolled user is considered as the target class (genuine) and the unauthorized users are considered as unknown classes (impostor). We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based approach for one class classification in which a zero centered Gaussian noise and an autoencoder are used to model the pseudo-negative class and to regularize the network to learn meaningful feature representations for one class data, respectively. The overall network is trained using a combination of the cross-entropy and the reconstruction error losses. A key feature of the proposed approach is that any pre-trained CNN can be used as the base network for one class classification. Effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated using three publically available face-based active authentication datasets and it is shown that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to the traditional one class classification methods. The source code is available at: github.com/otkupjnoz/oc-acnn.Comment: Accepted and to appear at AFGR 201

FinBTech: Blockchain-Based Video and Voice Authentication System for Enhanced Security in Financial Transactions Utilizing FaceNet512 and Gaussian Mixture Models

In the digital age, it is crucial to make sure that financial transactions are as secure and reliable as possible. This abstract offers a ground-breaking method that combines smart contracts, blockchain technology, FaceNet512 for improved face recognition, and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for speech authentication to create a system for video and audio verification that is unmatched. Smart contracts and the immutable ledger of the blockchain are combined to offer a safe and open environment for financial transactions. FaceNet512 and GMM offer multi-factor biometric authentication simultaneously, enhancing security to new heights. By combining cutting-edge technology, this system offers a strong defense against identity theft and illegal access, establishing a new benchmark for safe financial transactions