The use of biometrics looks promising as it is already being applied in electronic passports, ePassports, on a global scale. Because the biometric data has to be stored as a reference template on either a central or personal storage device, its wide-spread use introduces new security and privacy risks such as (i) identity fraud, (ii) cross-matching, (iii) irrevocability and (iv) leaking sensitive medical information. Mitigating these risks is essential to obtain the acceptance from the subjects of the biometric systems and therefore facilitating the successful implementation on a large-scale basis. A solution to mitigate these risks is to use template protection techniques. The required protection properties of the stored reference template according to ISO guidelines are (i) irreversibility, (ii) renewability and (iii) unlinkability. A known template protection scheme is the helper data system (HDS). The fundamental principle of the HDS ...

Steganography is the science that involves communicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier, e.g., image, audio and video files. It comes under the assumption that if the feature is visible, the point of attack is evident, thus the goal here is always to conceal the very existence of the embedded data. It does not replace cryptography but rather boosts the security using its obscurity features. Steganography has various useful applications. However, like any other science it can be used for ill intentions. It has been propelled to the forefront of current security techniques by the remarkable growth in computational power, the increase in security awareness, e.g., individuals, groups, agencies, government and through intellectual pursuit. Steganography’s ultimate objectives, which are undetectability, robustness, resistance to various image processing methods and compression, and capacity of the hidden data, are the main factors ...

The achievement of perfect security is out of the question. Even if we are not yet aware of them, every security aimed technology has weaknesses which attackers can exploit in order to circumvent the system. We should hence direct our efforts to the development of applications whose security level make it infeasible for computationally bound attackers to break the systems. This Thesis is focused on improving the security and privacy provided by biometric systems. With the increased need for reliable and automatic identity verification, biometrics have emerged in the last decades as a pushing alternative to traditional authentication methods. Certainly, biometrics are very attractive and useful for the general public: forget about PINs and passwords, you are your own key. However, the wide deployment of biometric recognition systems at both large-scale applications (e.g., border management at European level or national ...

As biometrics gains popularity and proliferates into the daily life, there is an increased concern over the loss of privacy and potential misuse of biometric data held in central repositories. The major concerns are about i) the use of biometrics to track people, ii) non-revocability of biometrics (eg. if a fingerprint is compromised it can not be canceled or reissued), and iii) disclosure of sensitive information such as race, gender and health problems which may be revealed by biometric traits. The straightforward suggestion of keeping the biometric data in a user owned token (eg. smart cards) does not completely solve the problem, since malicious users can claim that their token is broken to avoid biometric verification altogether. Put together, these concerns brought the need for privacy preserving biometric authentication methods in the recent years. In this dissertation, we survey existing ...

This thesis has two main parts. The first part deals with security and privacy analysis of biometric hashing. The second part introduces a method for fixed-length feature vector extraction and hash generation from fingerprint minutiae. The upsurge of interest in biometric systems has led to development of biometric template protection methods in order to overcome security and privacy problems. Biometric hashing produces a secure binary template by combining a personal secret key and the biometric of a person, which leads to a two factor authentication method. This dissertation analyzes biometric hashing both from a theoretical point of view and in regards to its practical application. For theoretical evaluation of biohashes, a systematic approach which uses estimated entropy based on degree of freedom of a binomial distribution is outlined. In addition, novel practical security and privacy attacks against face image hashing ...

,The term biometrics refers to the technologies that measure and analyze human intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics for authenticating individuals. Nowadays, biometric technology is increasingly deployed in civil and commercial applications. The growing use of biometrics is raising security and privacy concerns. Storing biometric data, known as biometric templates, in a database leads to several privacy risks such as identity fraud and cross matching. A solution is to apply biometric template protection techniques, which aim to make it impossible to recover the biometric data from the templates. The goal of our research is to combine biometric systems with template protection. Aimed at fingerprint recognition, this thesis introduces the Spectral Minutiae Representation method, which enables the combination of a minutiae-based fingerprint recognition system with template protection schemes based on fuzzy commitment or helper data schemes. In this thesis, three spectral minutiae ...

Absolute security does not exist: given funding, willpower and the proper technology, every security system can be compromised. However, the objective of the security community should be to develop such applications that the funding, the will, and the resources needed by the attacker to crack the system prevent him from attempting to do so. This Thesis is focused on the vulnerability assessment of biometric systems. Although being relatively young compared to other mature and long-used security technologies, biometrics have emerged in the last decade as a pushing alternative for applications where automatic recognition of people is needed. Certainly, biometrics are very attractive and useful for the final user: forget about PINs and passwords, you are your own key. However, we cannot forget that as any technology aimed to provide a security service, biometric systems are exposed to external attacks which ...

In recent years, the usage of digital video has steadily been increasing. Since the amount of data for uncompressed digital video representation is very high, lossy source coding techniques are usually employed in digital video systems to compress that information and make it more suitable for storage and transmission. The source coding algorithms for video compression can be grouped into two big classes: the traditional and the scalable techniques. The goal of the traditional video coders is to maximize the compression efficiency corresponding to a given amount of compressed data. The goal of scalable video coding is instead to give a scalable representation of the source, such that subsets of it are able to describe in an optimal way the same video source but with reduced resolution in the temporal, spatial and/or quality domain. This thesis is focused on the ...

In the next era of communications, where heterogeneous, asynchronous and ultra-low latency networks are drawn on the horizon, classical cryptography might be inadequate due to the excessive cost of maintaining a public-key infrastructure and the high computational capacity required in the devices. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee that the computational capacity of adversaries would not be able to break the cryptograms. Consequently, information-theoretic security, and particularly its application to keyless secrecy communication, might play an important role in the future development of these systems. The notion of secrecy in this case does not rely on any assumption of the computational power of eavesdroppers, and is based instead on guaranteeing statistical independence between the information message and the observed cryptogram. This is possible by constructing channel codes that exploit the noisy behavior of the channels involved in the ...

This dissertation studies soft biometrics traits, their applicability in different security and commercial scenarios, as well as related usability aspects. We place the emphasis on human facial soft biometric traits which constitute the set of physical, adhered or behavioral human characteristics that can partially differentiate, classify and identify humans. Such traits, which include characteristics like age, gender, skin and eye color, the presence of glasses, moustache or beard, inherit several advantages such as ease of acquisition, as well as a natural compatibility with how humans perceive their surroundings. Specifically, soft biometric traits are compatible with the human process of classifying and recalling our environment, a process which involves constructions of hierarchical structures of different refined traits. This thesis explores these traits, and their application in soft biometric systems (SBSs), and specifically focuses on how such systems can achieve different goals ...

The increasing number of simultaneous input and output channels utilized in immersive audio configurations primarily in broadcasting applications has renewed industrial requirements for efficient audio coding schemes with low bit-rate and complexity. This thesis presents a comprehensive review and extension of conventional approaches for perceptual coding of arbitrary multichannel audio signals. Particular emphasis is given to use cases ranging from two-channel stereophonic to six-channel 5.1-surround setups with or without the application-specific constraint of low algorithmic coding latency. Conventional perceptual audio codecs share six common algorithmic components, all of which are examined extensively in this thesis. The first is a signal-adaptive filterbank, constructed using instances of the real-valued modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), to obtain spectral representations of successive portions of the incoming discrete time signal. Within this MDCT spectral domain, various intra- and inter-channel optimizations, most of which are of ...

The growing risk of privacy violation and espionage associated with the rapid spread of mobile communications renewed interest in the original concept of sending encrypted voice as audio signal over arbitrary voice channels. The usual methods used for encrypted data transmission over analog telephony turned out to be inadequate for modern vocal links (cellular networks, VoIP) equipped with voice compression, voice activity detection, and adaptive noise suppression algorithms. The limited available bandwidth, nonlinear channel distortion, and signal fadings motivate the investigation of a dedicated, joint approach for speech encoding and encryption adapted to modern noisy voice channels. This thesis aims to develop, analyze, and validate secure and efficient schemes for real-time speech encryption and transmission via modern voice channels. In addition to speech encryption, this study covers the security and operational aspects of the whole voice communication system, as this ...

In nowadays communication systems, error correction provides robust data transmission through imperfect (noisy) channels. Error correcting codes are a crucial component in most storage and communication systems – wired or wireless –, e.g. GSM, UMTS, xDSL, CD/DVD. At least as important as the data integrity issue is the recent realization that error correcting codes fundamentally change the trade-offs in system design. High-integrity, low redundancy coding can be applied to increase data rate, or battery life time or by reducing hardware costs, making it possible to enter mass market. When it comes to the design of error correcting codes and their properties, there are two main theories that play an important role in this work. Classical coding theory aims at finding the best code given an available block length. This thesis focuses on the ubiquitous Reed-Solomon codes, one of the major ...

Due to some tragic events such as crime, bank robberies and terrorist attacks, an unparalleled surge in video surveillance cameras has occurred in recent years. In consequence, our daily life is overseen everywhere (e.g. on the street, in stations, in shops and in the workplace). For example, on average, people living in London can be caught on cameras more than 300 times a day. At the same time, automatic processing technology and quality of sensors have advanced significantly, which has even enabled automatic detection, tracking and identification of individuals. With the proliferation of video surveillance systems and the progress in automatic recognition, privacy protection is now becoming a significant concern. Video surveillance is intrusive because it allows the observation of certain information that is considered as private (i.e., identity or some characteristics such as age, race, gender). Nowadays, some processing ...

During the past two decades, image compression has developed from a mostly academic Rate-Distortion (R-D) field, into a highly commercial business. Various lossless and lossy image coding techniques have been developed. This thesis represents an interdisciplinary work between the field of astronomy and digital image processing and brings new aspects into both of the fields. In fact, image compression had its beginning in an American space program for efficient data storage. The goal of this research work is to recognize and develop new methods for space observatories and software tools to incorporate compression in space astronomy standards. While the astronomers benefit from new objective processing and analysis methods and improved efficiency and quality, for technicians a new field of application and research is opened. For validation of the processing results, the case of InfraRed (IR) astronomy has been specifically analyzed. ...