The fight against identity theft
The research project Secure Access Control Over Wide
Area Network (SWAN), is a project funded by The Research Council of
Norway. The SWAN-project will research and develop innovative
technologies and countermeasures to mitigate presentation attacks (also
coined as spoofing attacks), which lead to a usable, economic, and
privacy-preserving access control platform based on biometrics.
On
2nd November the Kick-Off meeting of the SWAN-project was held at
Gjøvik University College. The project has 6 partners from Norway,
Germany, France and Switzerland and is truly an European research
project Gjøvik University College (http://nislab.no/biometrics_lab) as
the coordinator of the project, is working closely with its partners
University of Oslo (http://folk.uio.no/josang), Idiap Research Institute
in Switzerland (http://www.idiap.ch/biometrics), Safran Morpho
(http://www.morpho.com) and Zwipe (http://www.zwipe.com). The group
assembles standing experience in identity and biometrics research and
more particularly in mobile face and speaker recognition as well as in
presentation attack detection (aka anti-spoofing). The team is supported
by end users from the financial sector and the Association of German
Banks.
The Password-based approach is
vulnerable, and crime related to illegal access to different accounts is
easier than ever because of password used as authentication factor,
says Professor Christoph Busch at Gjøvik University College. The
research will initially deal with banking transactions, but the goal is
to extend the technology to other e-services such as e-health.
Biometric
references will be stored, controlled and verified locally based on a
pre-shared secret, which can be used to seal and authenticate
transaction data. This overcomes the need of centralized storage of
biometric data. Smartphones will act as hardware tokens to which the
additional functionalities will be integrated to capture the biometric
characteristics like (face, fingerprint, voice and eye). Focus of the
research project will be biometric authentication to preserve privacy
and adapt existing and emerging standards in the field.
Read more: http://nislab.no/biometrics_lab/swan