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Secure chips, e.g., present in smart cards, USB dongles, i-buttons, are now ubiquitous in applications with strong security requirements. Moreover, they require embedded data management techniques. However, secure chips have severe hardware constraints, which make traditional database techniques irrelevant. The main problem faced by secure chip DBMS designers is to be able to assess various design choices and trade-offs for different applications. Our solution is to use a benchmark for secure chip DBMS in order to 1) compare different database techniques, 2) predict the limits of on-chip applications, and 3) provide codesign hints. In this paper, we propose Data management in Secure Chip (DISC), a benchmark that reaches these three objectives. This work benefits from our long experience in developing and tuning data management techniques for the smart card. To validate DiSC, we compare the behavior of candidate data management techniques using a cycle-accurate smart-card simulator. Furthermore, we show the applicability of DiSC to future designs involving new hardware platforms and new database techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an authentication methodology that combines multimodal biometrics and cryptographic mechanisms for border control applications. We accommodate faces and fingerprints without a mandatory requirement of (tamper-resistant) smart-card-level devices on e-passports for easier deployment, It is even allowable to imprint (publicly readable) bar codes on the passports. Additionally, we present a solution based on the certification and key management method to control the validity of passports within the current Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric sensor interoperability refers to the ability of a system to compensate for the variability introduced in the biometric data of an individual due to the deployment of different sensors. Poor intersensor performance has been reported in different biometric domains including fingerprint, face, iris, and speech. In the context of fingerprint technology, variations are observed in the acquired images of a fingerprint due to differences in sensor resolution, scanning area, sensing technology, etc., which subsequently impact the feature set extracted from these images. The inability of a fingerprint matcher to compensate for these variations introduced by different sensors results in inferior intersensor matching performance. In this work, a nonlinear calibration scheme based on the Thin- Plate Spline (TPS) model is used to register a pair of fingerprint sensors. The proposed calibration technique relies on the evidence of a few image pairs acquired using the two sensors to generate an average deformation model that defines the spatial relationship between the two sensors. This assists in the systematic perturbation of images/features pertaining to one sensor in order to make them compatible with images/features originating from the other sensor. Experimental results using multiple fingerprint data sets confirm the efficacy of the proposed method in addressing intersensor geometric variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy-based management for federated healthcare systems has recently gained increasing attention due to strict privacy and disclosure rules. Although the work on privacy languages and enforcement mechanisms, such as Hippocratic databases, has advanced our understanding of designing privacy-preserving policies for healthcare databases, the need to integrate these policies in a practical healthcare framework is becoming acute. Additionally, although most work in this area has been organization oriented, dealing with the exchange of information between healthcare organizations (such as referrals), the requirements for the emerging area of personal healthcare information management have so far not been adequately addressed. These shortcomings arise from the lack of a sophisticated policy specification language and enforcement architecture that can capture the requirement for 1) the integration of privacy and disclosure policies with well-known healthcare standards used in the industry in order to specify the precise requirements of a practical healthcare system and 2) the provision of ubiquitous healthcare services to patients using the same infrastructure that enables federated healthcare management for organizations. In this paper, we have designed a policy-based system to mitigate these concerns. First, we have designed our disclosure and privacy policies by using a requiremEnts specification based on a set of use cases for the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard proposed by the community. Second, we present a context-aware policy specification language, which allows encoding of CDA-based requirements use cases into privacy and disclosure policy rules. We have shown that our policy specification language is effective in terms of handling a variety of expressive constraints on CDA-encoded document contents. Our language enables specification of privacy-aware access control for federated healthcare information across organizational boundaries, whereas the use of contextual constraints allows the incorporation of user and environment context in the access control mechanism for personal healthcare information management. Moreover, the declarative syntax of the policy rules makes the policy adaptable to changes in privacy regulations or patient preferences. We also present an enforcement architecture for the federated healthcare framework proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spyware is a relatively new phenomenon, affecting more than 50 percent of Windows operating systems failures, as reported by users to Microsoft. It can sneak onto computer systems, monitor them, capture user data and transmit it to third parties. It is the aim of this article to discuss how spyware works and how to guard against it.

The literature on physical database design in general, and on rile segmentation in particular, typically ignores any consideration of data security and the cost to enforce it. If records can be physically designed so that all data elements in a given record type have identical security restrictions for a given user, then data element level security enforcement can he transformed into the less costly rile level security enforcement for that user and file. Similarly, If all record types have identical security restrictions, file based security might be sufficient. This paper extends an earlier model for file segmentation to include security considerations. The extended model embeds the security measures into the logical file structure and exploits a four category taxonomy of security restriction types. The model is used to generalize the interaction between element level selective security and physical data- base design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Databases may be compromised by asking a set of queries which return only statistical information and making inferences about a specific entry from the results of the set of queries. We present methods of constructing the set of queries to compromise a database where all the queries in the set return the maximum of a set of k elements, or all queries return the mean of a set of k elements. In the case of the mean query, all elements involved will be compromised. We also consider bounds on the number of queries required to compromise the database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]