Ubic: Bridging the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world

Advances in computing technology increasingly blur the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world. Although the research community has developed a large number of cryptographic primitives and has demonstrated their usability in all-digital communication, many of them have not yet made their way into the real world due to usability aspects. We aim to make another step towards a tighter integration of digital cryptography into real world interactions. We describe Ubic, a framework that allows users to bridge the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world. Ubic relies on head-mounted displays, like Google Glass, resource-friendly computer vision techniques as well as mathematically sound cryptographic primitives to provide users with better security and privacy guarantees. The framework covers key cryptographic primitives, such as secure identification, document verification using a novel secure physical document format, as well as content hiding. To make a contribution of practical value, we focused on making Ubic as simple, easily deployable, and user friendly as possible.Comment: In ESORICS 2014, volume 8712 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 56-75, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014. Springer, Berlin, German

Automatic Voting Machine – An Advanced Model for Secured Biometrics Based Voting System

India, which is now considered as the world’s largest democracy has been praised in the whole world for its democratic principles of “Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic, Republic”. It is now the second largest populous country in the world. Although the country has a rich technical and scientific infrastructure yet the voting and election procedures do not reflect it. In this paper we are going to propose a concept or idea about how the voting processes and equipments can be designed for a “free, fair and secure” polling in the upcoming days. Researchers have proved various problems related to the present voting technique in India which is through Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) [2]. Our proposed model of the equipment for voting will overcome those problems making elections & voting fair, convenient and reliable to every citizen. This proposed model will assure complete transparency and will definitely gain the trust and integrity of the voters. Biometric authentication and identity proof are given much priority while proposing the concept since biometric authentication is a type of system that relies on the unique biological characteristics (such as finger prints, retina scan, etc.) of individuals to verify identity for secure access to electronic systems. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15074

Development of CUiris: A Dark-Skinned African Iris Dataset for Enhancement of Image Analysis and Robust Personal Recognition

Iris recognition algorithms, especially with the emergence of large-scale iris-based identification systems, must be tested for speed and accuracy and evaluated with a wide range of templates – large size, long-range, visible and different origins. This paper presents the acquisition of eye-iris images of dark-skinned subjects in Africa, a predominant case of verydark- brown iris images, under near-infrared illumination. The peculiarity of these iris images is highlighted from the histogram and normal probability distribution of their grayscale image entropy (GiE) values, in comparison to Asian and Caucasian iris images. The acquisition of eye-images for the African iris dataset is ongoing and will be made publiclyavailable as soon as it is sufficiently populated

Some Potential Issues with the Security of HTML5 IndexedDB

The new HTML5 standard provides much more access to client resources, such as user location and local data storage. Unfortunately, this greater access may create new security risks that potentially can yield new threats to user privacy and web attacks. One of these security risks lies with the HTML5 client-side database. It appears that data stored on the client file system is unencrypted. Therefore, any stored data might be at risk of exposure. This paper explains and performs a security investigation into how the data is stored on client local file systems. The investigation was undertaken using Firefox and Chrome web browsers, and Encase (a computer forensic tool), was used to examine the stored data. This paper describes how the data can be retrieved after an application deletes the client side database. Finally, based on our findings, we propose a solution to correct any potential issues and security risks, and recommend ways to store data securely on local file systems