Inheritance Forgery

Many venerable norms in inheritance law were designed to prevent forgery. Most prominently, since 1837, the Wills Act has required testators to express their last wishes in a signed and witnessed writing. Likewise, the court-supervised probate process helped ensure that a donative instrument was genuine and that assets passed to their rightful owners. But in the mid-twentieth century, concern about forgery waned. Based in part on the perception that counterfeit estate plans are rare, several states relaxed the Wills Act and authorized new formalities for notarized and even digital wills. In addition, lawmakers encouraged owners to bypass probate altogether by transmitting wealth through devices such as life insurance and transfer-on-death deeds. This Article offers a fresh look at inheritance-related forgery. Cutting against the conventional wisdom, it discovers that counterfeit donative instruments are a serious problem. Using reported cases, empirical research, grand jury investigations, and media stories, it reveals that courts routinely adjudicate credible claims that wills, deeds, and life insurance beneficiary designations are illegitimate. The Article then argues that the persistence of inheritance-related forgeries casts doubt on the wisdom of some recent innovations, including statutes that permit notarized and electronic wills. The Article also challenges well-established inheritance law norms, including the litigation presumptions in will-forgery contests, the widespread practice of rubber-stamping deeds, and the delegation of responsibility for authenticating a nonprobate transfer to private companies. Finally, the Article outlines reforms to modernize succession while remaining sensitive to the risks of forgery

CoMoFoD #x2014; New database for copy-move forgery detection

Due to the availability of many sophisticated image processing tools, a digital image forgery is nowadays very often used. One of the common forgery method is a copy-move forgery, where part of an image is copied to another location in the same image with the aim of hiding or adding some image content. Numerous algorithms have been proposed for a copy-move forgery detection (CMFD), but there exist only few benchmarking databases for algorithms evaluation. We developed new database for a CMFD that consist of 260 forged image sets. Every image set includes forged image, two masks and original image. Images are grouped in 5 categories according to applied manipulation: translation, rotation, scaling, combination and distortion. Also, postprocessing methods, such as JPEG compression, blurring, noise adding, color reduction etc., are applied at all forged and original images. In this paper we present database organization and content, creation of forged images, postprocessing methods, and database testing. CoMoFoD database is available at http://www.vcl.fer.hr/comofodMinistry of Science, Education and Sport, China; project numbers: 036-0361630-1635 and 036-0361630-164

Forgery-Resistant Touch-based Authentication on Mobile Devices

Mobile devices store a diverse set of private user data and have gradually become a hub to control users' other personal Internet-of-Things devices. Access control on mobile devices is therefore highly important. The widely accepted solution is to protect access by asking for a password. However, password authentication is tedious, e.g., a user needs to input a password every time she wants to use the device. Moreover, existing biometrics such as face, fingerprint, and touch behaviors are vulnerable to forgery attacks. We propose a new touch-based biometric authentication system that is passive and secure against forgery attacks. In our touch-based authentication, a user's touch behaviors are a function of some random "secret". The user can subconsciously know the secret while touching the device's screen. However, an attacker cannot know the secret at the time of attack, which makes it challenging to perform forgery attacks even if the attacker has already obtained the user's touch behaviors. We evaluate our touch-based authentication system by collecting data from 25 subjects. Results are promising: the random secrets do not influence user experience and, for targeted forgery attacks, our system achieves 0.18 smaller Equal Error Rates (EERs) than previous touch-based authentication.Comment: Accepted for publication by ASIACCS'1

On content-based recommendation and user privacy in social-tagging systems

Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity, in which users engage collectively has been named social tagging, and it is one of the most popular in which users engage online, and although it has opened new possibilities for application interoperability on the semantic web, it is also posing new privacy threats. It, in fact, consists of describing online or offline resources by using free-text labels (i.e. tags), therefore exposing the user profile and activity to privacy attacks. Users, as a result, may wish to adopt a privacy-enhancing strategy in order not to reveal their interests completely. Tag forgery is a privacy enhancing technology consisting of generating tags for categories or resources that do not reflect the user's actual preferences. By modifying their profile, tag forgery may have a negative impact on the quality of the recommendation system, thus protecting user privacy to a certain extent but at the expenses of utility loss. The impact of tag forgery on content-based recommendation is, therefore, investigated in a real-world application scenario where different forgery strategies are evaluated, and the consequent loss in utility is measured and compared.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft