SIPBIO : biometrics SIP extension

During the last few decades biometric technologies have become an important research field in computer security. Their deployment, however, in heterogeneous enterprise systems, is complex due to the lack of standardisation. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a popular communication protocol widely used in voice over Internet protocol networks; due to its flexibility, SIP has been broadly adopted in telecommunications for carrier level and telephony systems. This thesis proposes the use of SIPBIO, an extension to SIP, to establish and control multimedia sessions for biometric interactions. For biometric usage in telecommunications networks, a synthesis of techniques to use human characteristics as challenge tokens for access to network resources is first presented. An overview of the SIP protocol is then exposed, by focusing on understanding SIP messages and their component elements. Posteriorly, advanced concepts, such as extensions to the default protocol are introduced. After the technology background review, the core of the proposal is presented with extensive use-case scenarios of biometric operations and the introduction of necessary SIPBIO requirements. Formal processes are defined along with the method to extend SIP to the proposed SIPBIO protocol. It follows a detailed outline of all headers and body components that give form to SIPBIO and define its nature. These stages provide the fundamentals for the protocol implementation. Finally, simulations of some common cases are presented to show the feasibility of SIPBIO. This can be used as a sample flow for full implementations and applications. This thesis corroborates the viability of using a SIP-based protocol for establishing, maintaining and tearing down biometric multimedia sessions