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Biometric recognition has been proven to offer a reliable solution to authenticate the identity of the legitimate user. Because of the inherent nature of biometrics, which involves the practice of digitally scanning the physiological or behavioral characteristics of individuals as a means of identification, the biometric trait employed is associated permanently with an individual and cannot be modified. This paper proposes a multimodal biometric template protection algorithm for the security of stored biometric templates in a database. The proposed algorithm is based on watermarking, shuffling process, Hadamard matrix and chaotic map. The security of the algorithm depends on the secrecy of the keys and the chaotic map. Watermarking based on Discrete Wavelet Transform-Singular Value Decomposition has been applied to fuse the features of face and fingerprint in order to improve the security of biometric data. To satisfy the requirements of a biometric template protection algorithm, each genuine user is assigned a unique key for the shuffling process and a unique code is generated using Hadamard matrix. Hadamard matrix is used to provide orthogonality and chaotic map for randomization. The identification process is carried out using Hamming distance. The experimental results give a good performance in terms of achieving a minimum value of FRR and FAR in comparison with previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a number of issues related to the development of biometric authentication systems, such as privacy breach, consequential security and biometric template storage. Thus, the current paper aims to address these issues through the hybrid approach of watermarking with biometric encryption. A multimodal biometric template protection approach with fusion at score level using fingerprint and face templates is proposed. The proposed approach includes two basic stages, enrollment stage and verification stage. During the enrollment stage, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is applied on the face images to embed the fingerprint features into different directional sub-bands. Watermark embedding and extraction are done by quantizing the mean values of the wavelet coefficients. Subsequently, the inverse DWT is applied to obtain the watermarked image. Following this, a unique token is assigned for each genuine user and a hyper-chaotic map is used to produce a key stream in order to encrypt a watermarked image using block-cipher. The experimentation results indicate the efficiency of the proposed approach in term of achieving a reasonable error rate of 3.87%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal authentication systems based on biometrics have given rise to new problems and challenges related to the protection of personal data, issues of less concern in traditional authentication systems. The irrevocability of biometric templates makes biometric systems very vulnerable to several attacks. In this paper we present a new approach for biometric template protection. Our objective is to build a non-invertible transformation, based on random projection, which meets the requirements of revocability, diversity, security and performance. In this context, we use the chaotic behavior of logistic map to build the projection vectors using a methodology that makes the construction of the projection matrix depend on the biometric template and its identity. The proposed approach has been evaluated and compared with Biohashing and BioPhasor using a rigorous security analysis. Our extensive experimental results using several databases (e.g., face, finger-knuckle and iris), show that the proposed technique has the ability to preserve and increase the performance of protected systems. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the security of the proposed approach is sufficiently robust to possible attacks keeping an acceptable balance between discrimination, diversity and non-invertibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of delivery effectiveness, Vehicular Adhoc NETworks (VANETs) applications have multiple, possibly conflicting, and disparate needs (e.g., latency, reliability, and delivery priorities). Named Data Networking (NDN) has attracted the attention of the research community for effective content retrieval and dissemination in mobile environments such as VANETs. A vehicle in a VANET application is heavily reliant on information about the content, network, and application, which can be obtained from a variety of sources. The information gathered can be used as context to make better decisions. While it is difficult to obtain the necessary context information at the IP network layer, the emergence of NDN is changing the tide. The Pending Information Table (PIT) is an important player in NDN data retrieval. PIT size is the bottleneck due to the limited opportunities provided by current memory technologies. PIT overflow results in service disruptions as new Interest messages cannot be added to PIT. Adaptive, context-aware PIT entry management solutions must be introduced to NDN-based VANETs for effective content dissemination. In this context, our main contribution is a decentralised, context-aware PIT entry management (CPITEM) protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed CPITEM protocol achieves lower Interest Satisfaction Delay and effective PIT utilization based on context when compared to existing PIT entry replacement protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] A new approach for fingerprint template protection is proposed. [•] A new representation is used instead of the traditional minutiae-based representation. [•] Requirements of revocability, diversity, security and performance are achieved. [•] The approach is sufficiently robust to the zero effort and brute force attacks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, an efficient local appearance feature extraction method based on Steerable Pyramid (S-P) wavelet transform is proposed for face recognition. Local information is extracted by computing the statistics of each sub-block obtained by dividing S-P sub-bands. The obtained local features of each sub-band are combined at the feature and decision level to enhance face recognition performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of S-P as feature extraction method for face recognition. The proposed approach is compared with some related feature extraction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), as well as linear discriminant analysis LDA and boosted LDA. Different multi-resolution transforms, wavelet (DWT), gabor, curvelet and contourlet, are also compared against the block-based S-P method. Experimental results on ORL, Yale, Essex and FERET face databases convince us that the proposed method provides a better representation of the class information, and obtains much higher recognition accuracies in real-world situations including changes in pose, expression and illumination. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In health sector, trust is considered important because it indirectly influences the quality of health care through patient satisfaction, adherence and the continuity of its relationship with health care professionals and the promotion of accurate and timely diagnoses. One of the important requirements of TRSs in the health sector is rating secrecy, which mandates that the identification information about the service consumer should be kept secret to prevent any privacy violation. Anonymity and trust are two imperative objectives, and no significant explicit efforts have been made to achieve both of them at the same time. In this paper, we present a framework for solving the problem of reconciling trust with anonymity in the health sector. Our solution comprises Anonymous Reputation Management (ARM) protocol and Context-aware Trustworthiness Assessment (CTA) protocol. ARM protocol ensures that only those service consumers who received a service from a specific service provider provide a recommendation score anonymously with in the specified time limit. The CTA protocol computes the reputation of a user as a service provider and as a recommender. To determine the correctness of the proposed ARM protocol, formal modelling and verification are performed using High Level Petri Nets (HLPN) and Z3 Solver. Our simulation results verify the accuracy of the proposed context-aware trust assessment scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand Response (DR) programs under the umbrella of Demand Side Management (DSM) tend to involve end users in optimizing their Power Consumption (PC) patterns and offer financial incentives to shift the load at "low-priced" hours. However, users have their own preferences of anticipating the amount of consumed electricity. While installing an Energy Management System (EMS), the user must be assured that this investment gives optimum comfort of bill savings, as well as appliance utility considering Time of Use (ToU). Moreover, there is a difference between desired load distribution and optimally-scheduled load across a 24-h time frame for lowering electricity bills. This difference in load usage timings, if it is beyond the tolerance level of a user, increases frustration. The comfort level is a highly variable phenomenon. An EMS giving optimum comfort to one user may not be able to provide the same level of satisfaction to another who has different preferences regarding electricity bill savings or appliance utility. Under such a diversity of human behaviors, it is difficult to select an EMS for an individual user. In this work, a numeric performance metric,"User Comfort Level (UCL)" is formulated on the basis of user preferences on cost saving, tolerance in delay regarding use of an appliance and return of investment. The proposed framework (UCL) allows the user to select an EMS optimally that suits his.her preferences well by anticipating electricity bill reduction, tolerable delay in ToU of the appliance and return on investment. Furthermore, an extended literature analysis is conducted demonstrating generic strategies of EMSs. Five major building blocks are discussed and a comparative analysis is presented on the basis of the proposed performance metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel routing strategy to cater the energy consumption and delay sensitivity issues in deep underwater wireless sensor networks is proposed. This strategy is named as ESDR: Event Segregation based Delay sensitive Routing. In this strategy sensed events are segregated on the basis of their criticality and, are forwarded to their respective destinations based on forwarding functions. These functions depend on different routing metrics like: Signal Quality Index, Localization free Signal to Noise Ratio, Energy Cost Function and Depth Dependent Function. The problem of incomparable values of previously defined forwarding functions causes uneven delays in forwarding process. Hence forwarding functions are redefined to ensure their comparable values in different depth regions. Packet forwarding strategy is based on the event segregation approach which forwards one third of the generated events (delay sensitive) to surface sinks and two third events (normal events) are forwarded to mobile sinks. Motion of mobile sinks is influenced by the relative distribution of normal nodes. We have also incorporated two different mobility patterns named as; adaptive mobility and uniform mobility for mobile sinks. The later one is implemented for collecting the packets generated by the normal nodes. These improvements ensure optimum holding time, uniform delay and in-time reporting of delay sensitive events. This scheme is compared with the existing ones and outperforms the existing schemes in terms of network lifetime, delay and throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, to monitor the fields with square and circular geometries, three energy-efficient routing protocols are proposed for underwater wireless sensor networks. First one is sparsity-aware energy-efficient clustering, second one is circular sparsity-aware energy-efficient clustering, and the third one is circular depth–based sparsity-aware energy-efficient clustering routing protocol. All three protocols are proposed to minimize the energy consumption of sparse regions, whereas sparsity search algorithm is proposed to find sparse regions and density search algorithm is used to find dense regions of the network field. Moreover, clustering is performed in dense regions to minimize redundant transmissions of a data packet, while sink mobility is exploited to collect data from sensor nodes with an objective of minimum energy consumption. A depth threshold ( d th ) value is also used to minimize number of hops between source and destination for less energy consumption. Simulation results show that our schemes perform better than their counter-part schemes (depth-based routing and energy-efficient depth-based routing) in terms of energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]