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Brain signals have been investigated for more than a century in the medical field. However, despite the broad interest in clinical applications, their use as a biometric identifier has been only recently considered by the scientific community. In this paper, we focus on the permanence across time of brain signals, specifically of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, issue of paramount importance for the deployment of brain-based biometric recognition systems in real life, not yet fully addressed. In particular, we speculate about the stability of EEG features by analyzing the recognition performance that can be achieved when comparing EEG signals acquired during different sessions. We carry out an extensive set of experimental tests, performed on several EEG-based biometric systems over a large database,\ud comprising three recordings taken from 50 healthy subjects in resting state conditions, acquired in a time span of approximately one month and a half. The results confirm that a significant level of permanence can be guaranteed

A new approach for keystroke-based authentication when using a cellular phone keypad as input device is presented. In the proposed method, users are authenticated using keystroke dynamics acquired when typing fixed alphabetic strings on a mobile phone keypad. The employed statistical classifier is able to perform user verification with an average equal error rate of about 13%. The obtained experimental results suggest that, when using mobile devices, a strong secure authentication scheme cannot rely on the sole keystroke dynamics, which however can be a module of a more complex system including, as basic security, a password-based protocol eventually hardened by keystroke analysis.

Recent years have seen the rapid spread of biometric technologies for automatic people recognition. However, security and privacy issues still represent the main obstacles for the deployment of biometric-based authentication systems. In this paper, we propose an approach, which we refer to as BioConvolving, that is able to guarantee security and renewability to biometric templates. Specifically, we introduce a set of noninvertible transformations, which can be applied to any biometrics whose template can be represented by a set of sequences, in order to generate multiple transformed versions of the template. Once the transformation is performed, retrieving the original data from the transformed template is computationally as hard as random guessing. As a proof of concept, the proposed approach is applied to an on-line signature recognition system, where a hidden Markov model-based matching strategy is employed. The performance of a protected on-line signature recognition system employing the proposed BioConvolving approach is evaluated, both in terms of authentication rates and renewability capacity, using the MCYT signature database. The reported extensive set of experiments shows that protected and renewable biometric templates can be properly generated and used for recognition, at the expense of a slight degradation in authentication performance

In this paper we discuss the feasibility of employing keystroke dynamics to perform user verification on mobile phones. Specifically, after having introduced a new statistical classifier, we analyze the discriminative capabilities of the features extracted from the acquired patterns, in order to determine which ones guarantee the best authentication performances. The effectiveness of using template selection techniques for keystroke verification is also investigated.The obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed method can be effectively employed to authenticate mobile phones users, even in operational contexts where the number of enrollment acquisition is kept low.

No abstract

In this letter, we investigate the permanence issue of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, elicited by visual stimuli, for biometric recognition purposes. Specifically, we evaluate the discriminative capabilities of generic visually-evoked potentials (VEPs) and of visual event-related potentials (ERPs) associated to specific cognitive tasks. Furthermore, we analyze the permanence issue of the considered EEG traits by verifying the stability across time of the achievable recognition rates. Experimental tests performed on a longitudinal database, comprising EEG data taken from 50 subjects during 3 different sessions, give evidence of the presence of repeatable discriminative characteristics in the individuals' EEG activity