A comparative study of teaching forensics at a university degree level

Computer forensics is a relatively young University discipline which has developed strongly in the United States and the United Kingdom but is still in its infancy in continental Europe. The national programmes and courses offered therefore differ in many ways. We report on two recently established degree programmes from two European countries: Great Britain and Germany. We present and compare the design of both programmes and conclude that they cover two complementary and orthogonal aspects of computer forensics education: (a) rigorous practical skills and (b) competence for fundamental research discoveries

Biometric presentation attack detection: beyond the visible spectrum

The increased need for unattended authentication in multiple scenarios has motivated a wide deployment of biometric systems in the last few years. This has in turn led to the disclosure of security concerns specifically related to biometric systems. Among them, presentation attacks (PAs, i.e., attempts to log into the system with a fake biometric characteristic or presentation attack instrument) pose a severe threat to the security of the system: any person could eventually fabricate or order a gummy finger or face mask to impersonate someone else. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and i i) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-theart techniques based on both handcrafted and deep learning features. The approach is evaluated on a database comprising over 4700 samples, stemming from 562 different subjects and 35 different presentation attack instrument (PAI) species. The results show the soundness of the proposed approach with a detection equal error rate (D-EER) as low as 1.35% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks

Fingerprint Verification Using Spectral Minutiae Representations

Most fingerprint recognition systems are based on the use of a minutiae set, which is an unordered collection of minutiae locations and orientations suffering from various deformations such as translation, rotation, and scaling. The spectral minutiae representation introduced in this paper is a novel method to represent a minutiae set as a fixed-length feature vector, which is invariant to translation, and in which rotation and scaling become translations, so that they can be easily compensated for. These characteristics enable the combination of fingerprint recognition systems with template protection schemes that require a fixed-length feature vector. This paper introduces the concept of algorithms for two representation methods: the location-based spectral minutiae representation and the orientation-based spectral minutiae representation. Both algorithms are evaluated using two correlation-based spectral minutiae matching algorithms. We present the performance of our algorithms on three fingerprint databases. We also show how the performance can be improved by using a fusion scheme and singular points

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201