ARMS: A new approach to control content sharing and rights distribution

As in other areas, one of the main issues in the educational sector is related with content distribution and sharing. Ensuring that the terms and conditions stated by content owners on the license are respected by the other participants of the value chain, such as distributors (eg. teachers) or consumers (eg. students) is a concern. The assignment of licenses is a need in order to the distributor in the DRM system unambiguously communicate the licensing of the content giving an enhanced user experience. Not only is important to validate the issued license verifying if the terms and the conditions stated in the parental license are respected in the child license but also is important to verify if this license is generated to users that are in a controlled domain. In this paper we will describe our rights-sharing control mechanism based in MPEG-21 standard that augments the control over a domain (the institution educational domain) through the validation of the license to be generated. Through a specific DRM system oriented to the educational context (ARMS - Academic Rights Management System) content owners are allowed to control which users can obtain a license within the constraints imposed by him, giving them the power to control the content usage in the educational domain. To enable this feature some special control mechanism, MPEG-21 based, were implemented in order to control the license issuance. With these verification mechanisms is possible to make the license distributor act like a domain controller regulating the issuance of licenses in the educational context. Our proposal, when applied in the educational domain, greatly increases the expressive power of digital rights management framework without requiring an upgrade to end-user devices.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Content related rights transmission with MPEG-21 in the educational field

One of the main issues affecting educational content distribution and sharing is to ensure that the terms and conditions defined by the content owners are respected by the others, such as distributors and consumers. Authorship and the content integrity are the most basic rights that authors want to preserve in the educational field. To ensure that content and associated rights are protected, cryptographic techniques and mechanisms are applied to content, rights, protection keys and related metadata that are packaged in a digital object. ARMS is a new platform that was developed to preserve author rights in the educational field applying the MPEG-21 standard concepts. A web based services interface is established with the educational Academic Management System of the Academic institution in order to verify the user eligibility in this domain. After obtaining the usage license the user can send the license to other users, if that privilege has been granted. Our proposal uses MPEG-21 concepts in order to enable rights transmission among the main participants in the educational environment but with a mechanism where the inheritance rights established by the author are uphold. Through the integration between ARMS and the Academic Management Information System hosted in the educational institutions, user academic data can be retrieved in order to verify his eligibility.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Discrete Wavelet Transform Based Cancelable Biometric System for Speaker Recognition

The biometric template characteristics and privacy conquest are challenging issues. To resolve such limitations, the cancelable biometric systems have been briefed. In this paper, the efficient cancelable biometric system based on the cryptosystem is introduced. It depends on permutation using a chaotic Baker map and substitution using masks in various transform domains. The proposed cancelable system features extraction phase is based on the Cepstral analysis from the encrypted speech signal in the time domain combined with the encrypted speech signal in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Then, the resultant features are applied to the artificial neural network for classification. Furthermore, wavelet denoising is used at the receiver side to enhance the proposed system. The cryptosystem provides a robust protection level of the speech template. This speech template can be replaced and recertified if it is breached. Our proposed system enables the generation of various templates from the same speech signal under the constraint of linkability between them. The simulation results confirmed that the proposed cancelable biometric system achieved higher a level of performance than traditional biometric systems, which achieved 97.5% recognition rate at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) of -25dB and 100% with -15dB and above

Blockchain Enabled Platforms for the Internet of Things

The Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) have gained a lot of attention in the last few years, since both technologies enable the possibility of creating a more connected and independent world. This combination enables the design of computing systems and cyber-physical environments without the need of centralized trusted entities, giving users the freedom and control of their operations, in a decentralized ledger model. By using storing and logging mechanisms supported by the Blockchain, data is immutable and independently audited, guaranteeing that it is neither modified nor deleted. At the same time, applications can benefit from the reliability and fault-tolerance assumptions provided by the Blockchain in supporting transactions between users and involved devices. In this thesis, it was studied and proposed a generic solution for a Blockchain-enabled IoT software architecture. The proposed solution enables the advantages of using decentralized logging and ledgering, without the interference of central authorities, inherently supported by the base Blockchain reliability, availability and security foundations. These capabilities are envisaged as key-benefits for a new generation of clean-slate approaches for IoT applications with the required scalability criteria. The research conducted in the dissertation work, studied the base software foundations, relevant components and implementation options that enable the identified advantages of using Blockchain components and services, to leverage more scalable and trustable IoT platforms. Our proposed solution aims to provide an architecture that contributes to a more appropriate design for secure and reliable IoT systems. In this trend we propose a better use of edge-based support for local-enabled processing environments supporting IoT devices and users’ interactions, with operations intermediated by proximity hubs acting as gateways to the Blockchain, where the operations are regulated and controlled by verifiable smart-contracts involving data and transactions

Regulating Electronic Money in Small-Value Payment Systems: Telecommunications Law as a Regulatory Model

A smart card, or stored value card, is a credit card-sized payment mechanism with an embedded integrated circuit chip. Current technology allows value to be placed on the card through an ATM terminal, a telephone equipped with a card reader, or a personal computer equipped with a card reader. The suitability of the card for small-value, high-volume transactions indicates that stored value cards could, to a large extent, replace currency transactions. Existing laws are not tailored to deal with the nature of transactions involving stored value cards, nor do they address nonbank card issuers. The integration of telecommunications and financial services strains traditional regulatory practices in both areas. Regulation of electronic money should be structured to eliminate barriers to competition and allow for innovation while creating a level playing field for both financial and nonfinancial issuers

Large-scale Biometrics Deployment in Europe: Identifying Challenges and Threats

With large-scale biometrics deployment in the EU still in its infancy and with stakeholders racing to position themselves in view of the lucrative market that is forecasted, a study to identify challenges and threats that need to be dealt with was launched. This is the result: a report on Biometrics large-scale Deployment in Europe. The report tackles three main issues namely, the status, security / privacy and testing / certification processes. A survey was launched so as to help reveal the actual status of Biometrics large-scale Deployment initiatives in EU. The main outcome of the survey was that an open dissemination of implementation results policy is needed mainly on deployment plans, strategies, barriers and best practices. The security/ privacy challenges study identified a number of issues, the most important of which were related to proportionality and compliance to the existing regulatory framework while at the same time it revealed an important number of related actions aiming at ensuring both data security and privacy. The aim of the Bio Testing Europe study was double: to identify and collect comparable and certified results under different technologies, vendors and environments situations and to feed in this information to animate discussion among the members of a European network which would enhance the European testing and certification capacity. The study presents an integrated picture of the identified issues as well as a number of recommendations. With some of the systems that are being implemented involving millions of individuals as target users it is important for policy makers to adopt some of the options presented so as to address the identified through the study challengesJRC.J.4-Information Societ

Rights and services interoperability for multimedia content management

The main goal of the work presented in this thesis is to describe the definition of interoperability mechanisms between rights expression languages and policy languages. Starting from languages interoperability, the intention is to go a step further and define how services for multimedia content management can interoperate by means of service-oriented generic and standardised architectures. In order to achieve this goal, several standards and existing initiatives will be analysed and taken into account. Regarding rights expression languages and policy languages, standards like MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language (REL), Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) are considered. Regarding services for content management, the Multimedia Information Protection And Management System (MIPAMS), a standards-based implemented architecture, and the Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), also known as MPEG-M standard, are considered. The contribution of this thesis is divided into two parts, one devoted to languages interoperability and the other one devoted to services interoperability, both addressed to multimedia content management. They are briefly described next. The first part of the contribution describes how MPEG-21 REL, ODRL and XACML can interoperate, defining the mapping mechanisms to translate expressions from language to language. The mappings provided have different levels of granularity, starting from a mapping based on a programmatic approach coming from high-level modelling diagrams done using Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Entity-Relationship (ER). The next level of mappings includes specific mappings between MPEG-21 REL and XACML and ODRL and XACML. Finally, a more general solution is proposed by using a broker. Part of this work was done in the context of the VISNET-II Network of Excellence and the AXMEDIS Integrated Project. The findings done prove the validity of the interoperability methods described. The second part of the contribution describes how to describe standards based building blocks to provide interoperable services for multimedia content management. This definition is based on the analysis of existing content management use cases, from the ones involving less security over multimedia content managed to the ones providing full-featured digital rights management (DRM) (including access control and ciphering techniques) to support secure content management. In this section it is also presented the work done in the research projects AXMEDIS, Musiteca and Culturalive. It is also shown the standardisation work done for MPEG-M, particularly on elementary services and service aggregation. To demonstrate the usage of both technologies a mobile application integrating both MPEG-M and MIPAMS is presented. Furthermore, some conclusions and future work is presented in the corresponding section, together with the refereed publications, which are briefly described in the document. In summary, the work presented can follow different research lines. On the one hand, further study on rights expression languages and policy languages is required as new versions of them have recently appeared. It is worth noting the standardisation of a contract expression language, MPEG-21 CEL, which has also to be further analysed in order to evaluate its interoperability with rights and policy languages. On the other hand, standard initiatives must be followed in order to complete the map of SB3's, considering MPEG standards and also other standards not only related to multimedia but also other application scenarios, like e-health or e-government