CardioCam: Leveraging Camera on Mobile Devices to Verify Users While Their Heart is Pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%

Multifrequency Averaging of Hysteresis-Current-Controlled DC-DC Converters

Multifrequency averaging is one of the widely used modeling and simulation techniques today for the analysis and design of power electronic systems. This technique is capable of providing the average behavior as well as the ripple behavior of power electronic systems. Hysteresis current control has fast response and internal current stability through controlling switches to maintain the current within a given hysteresis band of a given current command. However the state space variables in a hysteresis controlled system cannot be directly approached by multifrequency averaging method because of time varing switching frequency. In this thesis, a method of applying multifrequency averaging to hysteresis current controlled dc-dc converters is proposed. A dc-dc converter model with the application of this method has been successfully developed and validated both in simulation and experiment

Inferring Mobile Payment Passcodes Leveraging Wearable Devices

Mobile payment has drawn considerable attention due to its convenience of paying via personal mobile devices at anytime and anywhere, and passcodes (i.e., PINs) are the first choice of most consumers to authorize the payment. This work demonstrates a serious security breach and aims to raise the awareness of the public that the passcodes for authorizing transactions in mobile payments can be leaked by exploiting the embedded sensors in wearable devices (e.g., smartwatches). We present a passcode inference system, which examines to what extent the user's PIN during mobile payment could be revealed from a single wrist-worn wearable device under different input scenarios involving either two hands or a single hand. Extensive experiments with 15 volunteers demonstrate that an adversary is able to recover a user's PIN with high success rate within 5 tries under various input scenarios

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL STRESS IN THE JOINT ZONE OF TOWER PIER UNDER DIFFERENT SYSTEMS OF CABLE-STAYED BRIDGE

To explore the stress of the tower-beam-pier joint zone of a cable-stayed bridge under different systems, the submodel method in the finite element software ABAQUS was used to establish the local model of the tower-beam-pier joint zone of the bridge. At the same time, Midas/Civil was used to establish the rod system finite element model of the whole bridge. The correctness of the local model was verified by comparing the results of the finite element model and the local model. Then, by changing the combination mode of tower beam pier, the stress comparison analysis of the joint zone of the tower-beam-pier under different systems was carried out. The results showed the stress distribution of the semi-floating system was more reasonable than that of the rigid frame system and the consolidation system. In the use of the three different systems, there was concentrated tensile stress at the chamfer of the web and the bottom plate, where the steel bars should be added. In the rigid frame system, the deflection of the main beam under the load was the smallest, and the maximum displacement occurred at the boundary section, with the value of only 2.668mm

Extenics-based Study on Evaluation of Urban Community Home-care Service for the Elderly

AbstractThis paper tries to introduce extenics theory into the evaluation of the urban community home-care service for the elderly. The paper analyzes the feasibility of using extenics to evaluate the service, uses analytic hierarchy process to decide the weight of index and constructs a comprehensive evaluation model for the service on the basis of extenics. Based on the case study of communities in Ningbo, the paper has completed the evaluation of home-care service in operation and put forward countermeasures to the existing problems