Iris Biometric Watermarking for Authentication Using Multiband Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular-Value Decomposition

The most advanced technology, watermarking enables intruders to access the database. Various techniques have been developed for information security. Watermarks and histories are linked to many biometric techniques such as fingerprints, palm positions, gait, iris and speech are recommended. Digital watermarking is the utmost successful approaches among the methods available. In this paper the multiband wavelet transforms and singular value decomposition are discussed to establish a watermarking strategy rather than biometric information. The use of biometrics instead of conservative watermarks can enhance information protection. The biometric technology being used is iris. The iris template can be viewed as a watermark, while an iris mode of communication may be used to help information security with the addition of a watermark to the image of the iris. The research involves verifying authentication against different attacks such as no attacks, Jpeg Compression, Gaussian, Median Filtering and Blurring. The Algorithm increases durability and resilience when exposed to geometric and frequency attacks. Finally, the proposed framework can be applied not only to the assessment of iris biometrics, but also to other areas where privacy is critical

Integration of biometrics and steganography: A comprehensive review

The use of an individual’s biometric characteristics to advance authentication and verification technology beyond the current dependence on passwords has been the subject of extensive research for some time. Since such physical characteristics cannot be hidden from the public eye, the security of digitised biometric data becomes paramount to avoid the risk of substitution or replay attacks. Biometric systems have readily embraced cryptography to encrypt the data extracted from the scanning of anatomical features. Significant amounts of research have also gone into the integration of biometrics with steganography to add a layer to the defence-in-depth security model, and this has the potential to augment both access control parameters and the secure transmission of sensitive biometric data. However, despite these efforts, the amalgamation of biometric and steganographic methods has failed to transition from the research lab into real-world applications. In light of this review of both academic and industry literature, we suggest that future research should focus on identifying an acceptable level steganographic embedding for biometric applications, securing exchange of steganography keys, identifying and address legal implications, and developing industry standards

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

Robust steganographic techniques for secure biometric-based remote authentication

Biometrics are widely accepted as the most reliable proof of identity, entitlement to services, and for crime-related forensics. Using biometrics for remote authentication is becoming an essential requirement for the development of knowledge-based economy in the digital age. Ensuring security and integrity of the biometric data or templates is critical to the success of deployment especially because once the data compromised the whole authentication system is compromised with serious consequences for identity theft, fraud as well as loss of privacy. Protecting biometric data whether stored in databases or transmitted over an open network channel is a serious challenge and cryptography may not be the answer. The main premise of this thesis is that Digital Steganography can provide an alternative security solutions that can be exploited to deal with the biometric transmission problem. The main objective of the thesis is to design, develop and test steganographic tools to support remote biometric authentication. We focus on investigating the selection of biometrics feature representations suitable for hiding in natural cover images and designing steganography systems that are specific for hiding such biometric data rather than being suitable for general purpose. The embedding schemes are expected to have high security characteristics resistant to several types of steganalysis tools and maintain accuracy of recognition post embedding. We shall limit our investigations to embedding face biometrics, but the same challenges and approaches should help in developing similar embedding schemes for other biometrics. To achieve this our investigations and proposals are done in different directions which explain in the rest of this section. Reviewing the literature on the state-of-art in steganography has revealed a rich source of theoretical work and creative approaches that have helped generate a variety of embedding schemes as well as steganalysis tools but almost all focused on embedding random looking secrets. The review greatly helped in identifying the main challenges in the field and the main criteria for success in terms of difficult to reconcile requirements on embedding capacity, efficiency of embedding, robustness against steganalysis attacks, and stego image quality. On the biometrics front the review revealed another rich source of different face biometric feature vectors. The review helped shaping our primary objectives as (1) identifying a binarised face feature factor with high discriminating power that is susceptible to embedding in images, (2) develop a special purpose content-based steganography schemes that can benefit from the well-defined structure of the face biometric data in the embedding procedure while preserving accuracy without leaking information about the source biometric data, and (3) conduct sufficient sets of experiments to test the performance of the developed schemes, highlight the advantages as well as limitations, if any, of the developed system with regards to the above mentioned criteria. We argue that the well-known LBP histogram face biometric scheme satisfies the desired properties and we demonstrate that our new more efficient wavelet based versions called LBPH patterns is much more compact and has improved accuracy. In fact the wavelet version schemes reduce the number of features by 22% to 72% of the original version of LBP scheme guaranteeing better invisibility post embedding. We shall then develop 2 steganographic schemes. The first is the LSB-witness is a general purpose scheme that avoids changing the LSB-plane guaranteeing robustness against targeted steganalysis tools, but establish the viability of using steganography for remote biometric-based recognition. However, it may modify the 2nd LSB of cover pixels as a witness for the presence of the secret bits in the 1st LSB and thereby has some disadvantages with regards to the stego image quality. Our search for a new scheme that exploits the structure of the secret face LBPH patterns for improved stego image quality has led to the development of the first content-based steganography scheme. Embedding is guided by searching for similarities between the LBPH patterns and the structure of the cover image LSB bit-planes partitioned into 8-bit or 4-bit patterns. We shall demonstrate the excellent benefits of using content-based embedding scheme in terms of improved stego image quality, greatly reduced payload, reduced lower bound on optimal embedding efficiency, robustness against all targeted steganalysis tools. Unfortunately our scheme was not robust against the blind or universal SRM steganalysis tool. However we demonstrated robustness against SRM at low payload when our scheme was modified by restricting embedding to edge and textured pixels. The low payload in this case is sufficient to embed a secret full face LBPH patterns. Our work opens new exciting opportunities to build successful real applications of content-based steganography and presents plenty of research challenges