The proliferation of online biometric authentication has necessitated security requirements of biometric templates. The existing secure biometric authentication schemes feature a server-centric model, where a service provider maintains a biometric database and is fully responsible for the security of the templates.The end-users have to fully trust the server in storing, processing and managing their private templates.As a result, the end-users' templates could be compromised by outside attackers or even the service provider itself. In this paper, we propose a user-centric biometric authentication scheme (PassBio) that enables end-users to encrypt their own templates with our proposed light-weighted encryption scheme.During authentication, all the templates remain encrypted such that the server will never see them directly. However, the server is able to determine whether the distance of two encrypted templates is within a pre-defined threshold. Our security analysis shows that no critical information of the templates can be revealed under both passive and active attacks. PassBio follows a "compute-then-compare" computational model over encrypted data. More specifically, our proposed Threshold Predicate Encryption (TPE) scheme can encrypt two vectors x and y in such a manner that the inner product of x and y can be evaluated and compared to a pre-defined threshold. TPE guarantees that only the comparison result is revealed and no key information about x and y can be learned. Furthermore, we show that TPE can be utilized as a flexible building block to evaluate different distance metrics such as Hamming distance and Euclidean distance over encrypted data. Such a compute-then-compare computational model, enabled by TPE, can be widely applied in many interesting applications such as searching over encrypted data while ensuring data security and privacy. Index TermsBiometric authentication, data security and privacy, computation over encrypted data, predicate encryption, inner product encryptionThe authors are with the
Public goods games study the incentives of individuals to contribute to a public good and their behaviors in equilibria. In this paper, we examine a specific type of public goods game where players are networked and each has binary actions, and focus on the algorithmic aspects of such games. First, we show that checking the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is NP-complete. We then identify tractable instances based on restrictions of either utility functions or of the underlying graphical structure. In certain cases, we also show that we can efficiently compute a socially optimal Nash equilibrium. Finally, we propose a heuristic approach for computing approximate equilibria in general binary networked public goods games, and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness. Due to space limitation, some proofs are deferred to the extended version1.
Our private connections can be exposed by link prediction algorithms. To date, this threat has only been addressed from the perspective of a central authority, completely neglecting the possibility that members of the social network can themselves mitigate such threats. We fill this gap by studying how an individual can rewire her own network neighborhood to hide her sensitive relationships. We prove that the optimization problem faced by such an individual is NP-complete, meaning that any attempt to identify an optimal way to hide one’s relationships is futile. Based on this, we shift our attention towards developing effective, albeit not optimal, heuristics that are readily-applicable by users of existing social media platforms to conceal any connections they deem sensitive. Our empirical evaluation reveals that it is more beneficial to focus on “unfriending” carefully-chosen individuals rather than befriending new ones. In fact, by avoiding communication with just 5 individuals, it is possible for one to hide some of her relationships in a massive, real-life telecommunication network, consisting of 829,725 phone calls between 248,763 individuals. Our analysis also shows that link prediction algorithms are more susceptible to manipulation in smaller and denser networks. Evaluating the error vs. attack tolerance of link prediction algorithms reveals that rewiring connections randomly may end up exposing one’s sensitive relationships, highlighting the importance of the strategic aspect. In an age where personal relationships continue to leave digital traces, our results empower the general public to proactively protect their private relationships.
Discrete exponential operation, such as modular exponentiation and scalar multiplication on elliptic curves, is a basic operation of many public-key cryptosystems. However, the exponential operations are considered prohibitively expensive for resource-constrained mobile devices. In this paper, we address the problem of secure outsourcing of exponentiation operations to one single untrusted server. Our proposed scheme (ExpSOS) only requires very limited number of modular multiplications at local mobile environment thus it can achieve impressive computational gain. ExpSOS also provides a secure verification scheme with probability approximately 1 to ensure that the mobile end-users can always receive valid results. The comprehensive analysis as well as the simulation results in real mobile device demonstrates that our proposed ExpSOS can significantly improve the existing schemes in efficiency, security and result verifiability. We apply ExpSOS to securely outsource several cryptographic protocols to show that ExpSOS is widely applicable to many cryptographic computations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.