Texture to the Rescue : Practical Paper Fingerprinting based on Texture Patterns

In this article, we propose a novel paper fingerprinting technique based on analyzing the translucent patterns revealed when a light source shines through the paper. These patterns represent the inherent texture of paper, formed by the random interleaving of wooden particles during the manufacturing process. We show that these patterns can be easily captured by a commodity camera and condensed into a compact 2,048-bit fingerprint code. Prominent works in this area (Nature 2005, IEEE S&P 2009, CCS 2011) have all focused on fingerprinting paper based on the paper "surface." We are motivated by the observation that capturing the surface alone misses important distinctive features such as the noneven thickness, random distribution of impurities, and different materials in the paper with varying opacities. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the embedded paper texture provides a more reliable source for fingerprinting than features on the surface. Based on the collected datasets, we achieve 0% false rejection and 0% false acceptance rates. We further report that our extracted fingerprints contain 807 degrees of freedom (DoF), which is much higher than the 249 DoF with iris codes (that have the same size of 2,048 bits). The high amount of DoF for texturebased fingerprints makes our method extremely scalable for recognition among very large databases; it also allows secure usage of the extracted fingerprint in privacy-preserving authentication schemes based on error correction techniques

Secure fingerprinting on sound foundations

The rapid development and the advancement of digital technologies open a variety of opportunities to consumers and content providers for using and trading digital goods. In this context, particularly the Internet has gained a major ground as a worldwiede platform for exchanging and distributing digital goods. Beside all its possibilities and advantages digital technology can be misuesd to breach copyright regulations: unauthorized use and illegal distribution of intellectual property cause authors and content providers considerable loss. Protections of intellectual property has therefore become one of the major challenges of our information society. Fingerprinting is a key technology in copyright protection of intellectual property. Its goal is to deter people from copyright violation by allowing to provably identify the source of illegally copied and redistributed content. As one of its focuses, this thesis considers the design and construction of various fingerprinting schemes and presents the first explicit, secure and reasonably efficient construction for a fingerprinting scheme which fulfills advanced security requirements such as collusion-tolerance, asymmetry, anonymity and direct non-repudiation. Crucial for the security of such s is a careful study of the underlying cryptographic assumptions. In case of the fingerprinting scheme presented here, these are mainly assumptions related to discrete logarithms. The study and analysis of these assumptions is a further focus of this thesis. Based on the first thorough classification of assumptions related to discrete logarithms, this thesis gives novel insights into the relations between these assumptions. In particular, depending on the underlying probability space we present new reuslts on the reducibility between some of these assumptions as well as on their reduction efficency.Die Fortschritte im Bereich der Digitaltechnologien bieten Konsumenten, Urhebern und Anbietern große Potentiale für innovative Geschäftsmodelle zum Handel mit digitalen Gütern und zu deren Nutzung. Das Internet stellt hierbei eine interessante Möglichkeit zum Austausch und zur Verbreitung digitaler Güter dar. Neben vielen Vorteilen kann die Digitaltechnik jedoch auch missbräuchlich eingesetzt werden, wie beispielsweise zur Verletzung von Urheberrechten durch illegale Nutzung und Verbreitung von Inhalten, wodurch involvierten Parteien erhebliche Schäden entstehen können. Der Schutz des geistigen Eigentums hat sich deshalb zu einer der besonderen Herausforderungen unseres Digitalzeitalters entwickelt. Fingerprinting ist eine Schlüsseltechnologie zum Urheberschutz. Sie hat das Ziel, vor illegaler Vervielfältigung und Verteilung digitaler Werke abzuschrecken, indem sie die Identifikation eines Betrügers und das Nachweisen seines Fehlverhaltens ermöglicht. Diese Dissertation liefert als eines ihrer Ergebnisse die erste explizite, sichere und effiziente Konstruktion, welche die Berücksichtigung besonders fortgeschrittener Sicherheitseigenschaften wie Kollusionstoleranz, Asymmetrie, Anonymität und direkte Unabstreitbarkeit erlaubt. Entscheidend für die Sicherheit kryptographischer Systeme ist die präzise Analyse der ihnen zugrunde liegenden kryptographischen Annahmen. Den im Rahmen dieser Dissertation konstruierten Fingerprintingsystemen liegen hauptsächlich kryptographische Annahmen zugrunde, welche auf diskreten Logarithmen basieren. Die Untersuchung dieser Annahmen stellt einen weiteren Schwerpunkt dieser Dissertation dar. Basierend auf einer hier erstmals in der Literatur vorgenommenen Klassifikation dieser Annahmen werden neue und weitreichende Kenntnisse über deren Zusammenhänge gewonnen. Insbesondere werden, in Abhängigkeit von dem zugrunde liegenden Wahrscheinlichkeitsraum, neue Resultate hinsichtlich der Reduzierbarkeit dieser Annahmen und ihrer Reduktionseffizienz erzielt

Using smartphones to enable low-cost secure consumer IoT devices

This paper proposes a solution for low-cost consumer IoT devices to employ end-to-end security without requiring additional hardware. Manufacturers of consumer IoT devices often sacrifice security in favour of features, user-friendliness, time to market or cost, in order to stay ahead of their competitors. However, this is unwise, as demonstrated by recent hacks on consumer IoT devices. Low-cost embedded devices struggle to create suitable entropy for key generation; on the other hand, smartphones are both abundant and have multiple sources of entropy for strong key generation. The proposed architecture takes advantage of these properties and offloads key generation and transfer to the user's smartphone, removing the need for constrained IoT devices to perform public key infrastructure and generate symmetric keys. The authors implemented the design on a \$1 general-purpose microcontroller and then analysed the performance. The design allows all communication to and from the device to be encrypted while being simple to setup, low-cost and responsive without any additional manufacturing cost. The architecture presents a general solution, which could be implemented on any microcontroller. Since the architecture does not require any additional hardware, it can be retroactively applied to deployed devices through a firmware update

HANDLING WORK FROM HOME SECURITY ISSUES IN SALESFORCE

Security is a vital component when it is identified with an endeavor record or our genuine materials. To protect our home or valuable things like gold, cash we use bank storage administrations or underground secret storage spaces at home. Similarly, IT enterprises put tremendous measure of capital in expanding security to its business and the archives. Associations use cryptography procedures to get their information utilizing progressed encryption calculations like SHA-256, SHA-512, RSA-1024, RSA-2048 pieces’ key encryption and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) calculations. These industry standard calculations are difficult to break. For instance, to break RSA-2048-piece encryption key, an old-style PC needs around 300 trillion years. As indicated by the continuous examination, a quantum PC can break it in 10seconds, yet such a quantum PC doesn\u27t yet exist. Despite the fact that these cryptographic calculations guarantee an awesome degree of safety, there will be dependably a space for breaking the security. Programmers will attempt new techniques to break the security. Thus, the association likewise should continue to utilize new strategies to build the level and nature of the security. Now it is time to check how the security aspect is taken care of when the IT employees are at work from home. The 2020 year has made many professionals work from home because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 has transformed almost all organizations to work from home, this has become standard advice, and technology plays an important role during work from home to monitor the employee works and provide security when the work is being carried away from their respective organization. Employees\u27 information security awareness will become one of the most important parts of safeguarding against nefarious information security practices during this work from home. Most of the workers like the expediency of work from home and the flexibility provided for the employees. But in this situation, workers need guarantees that their privacy is secured when using company laptops and phones. Cyber security plays an important role in maintaining a secured environment when working from home. This work focusses on managing the security break attack in the course of work from home. The focus of the study is on dealing with security breaches that occur when salespeople operate from home. The problem of security isn\u27t new. Security issues existed prior to the lockdown or pandemic, but because the staff was working from the office at the time, the system administrator was available to address them. However, how can an employee\u27s laptop and account be secured when working from home? MFH\u27s salesforce has leveraged a variety of innovative technologies to address security concerns during their tenure. Because the IT behemoth Salesforce has made it possible for all employees, including freshly hired ones, to seek WFH on a permanent basis. To address the security breach difficulties faced by employees, the organization used a number of new approaches, including tracking working hours, raising password difficulty, employing VPN (virtual private network), mandating video during meetings, continuously checking right to use control, and MFA (multi-factor authentication). Improvement of existing multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the focused topic discussed in the thesis. To add an additional step of protection to the login process Blockchain technology is proposed and to identify the employee identification a hybrid recognition model is proposed using face and fingerprint recognition. This leads to the employee going through multiple processes to authenticate his or her identity in numerous ways in order to access the business laptop. This procedure entails connecting his or her laptop to his or her mobile phone or email account. Keywords: MFA, WFH, Cyber Security, Encryption, Decryption

Secure digital documents using Steganography and QR Code

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonWith the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking

Segurança e privacidade em terminologia de rede

Security and Privacy are now at the forefront of modern concerns, and drive a significant part of the debate on digital society. One particular aspect that holds significant bearing in these two topics is the naming of resources in the network, because it directly impacts how networks work, but also affects how security mechanisms are implemented and what are the privacy implications of metadata disclosure. This issue is further exacerbated by interoperability mechanisms that imply this information is increasingly available regardless of the intended scope. This work focuses on the implications of naming with regards to security and privacy in namespaces used in network protocols. In particular on the imple- mentation of solutions that provide additional security through naming policies or increase privacy. To achieve this, different techniques are used to either embed security information in existing namespaces or to minimise privacy ex- posure. The former allows bootstraping secure transport protocols on top of insecure discovery protocols, while the later introduces privacy policies as part of name assignment and resolution. The main vehicle for implementation of these solutions are general purpose protocols and services, however there is a strong parallel with ongoing re- search topics that leverage name resolution systems for interoperability such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Information Centric Networks (ICN), where these approaches are also applicable.Segurança e Privacidade são dois topicos que marcam a agenda na discus- são sobre a sociedade digital. Um aspecto particularmente subtil nesta dis- cussão é a forma como atribuímos nomes a recursos na rede, uma escolha com consequências práticas no funcionamento dos diferentes protocols de rede, na forma como se implementam diferentes mecanismos de segurança e na privacidade das várias partes envolvidas. Este problema torna-se ainda mais significativo quando se considera que, para promover a interoperabili- dade entre diferentes redes, mecanismos autónomos tornam esta informação acessível em contextos que vão para lá do que era pretendido. Esta tese foca-se nas consequências de diferentes políticas de atribuição de nomes no contexto de diferentes protocols de rede, para efeitos de segurança e privacidade. Com base no estudo deste problema, são propostas soluções que, através de diferentes políticas de atribuição de nomes, permitem introdu- zir mecanismos de segurança adicionais ou mitigar problemas de privacidade em diferentes protocolos. Isto resulta na implementação de mecanismos de segurança sobre protocolos de descoberta inseguros, assim como na intro- dução de mecanismos de atribuiçao e resolução de nomes que se focam na protecçao da privacidade. O principal veículo para a implementação destas soluções é através de ser- viços e protocolos de rede de uso geral. No entanto, a aplicabilidade destas soluções extende-se também a outros tópicos de investigação que recorrem a mecanismos de resolução de nomes para implementar soluções de intero- perabilidade, nomedamente a Internet das Coisas (IoT) e redes centradas na informação (ICN).Programa Doutoral em Informátic

Symmetry-Adapted Machine Learning for Information Security

Symmetry-adapted machine learning has shown encouraging ability to mitigate the security risks in information and communication technology (ICT) systems. It is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that relies on the principles of processing future events by learning past events or historical data. The autonomous nature of symmetry-adapted machine learning supports effective data processing and analysis for security detection in ICT systems without the interference of human authorities. Many industries are developing machine-learning-adapted solutions to support security for smart hardware, distributed computing, and the cloud. In our Special Issue book, we focus on the deployment of symmetry-adapted machine learning for information security in various application areas. This security approach can support effective methods to handle the dynamic nature of security attacks by extraction and analysis of data to identify hidden patterns of data. The main topics of this Issue include malware classification, an intrusion detection system, image watermarking, color image watermarking, battlefield target aggregation behavior recognition model, IP camera, Internet of Things (IoT) security, service function chain, indoor positioning system, and crypto-analysis