Biometrics – Pomcor

Airport Security in the Age of COVID-19

As the travel restrictions imposed to control the coronavirus pandemic are beginning to be relaxed in some parts of the world, it is time to start rethinking airport security in the age of COVID-19. Even if an effective vaccine is found for COVID-19, it will be out of the question to go back to long lines at security checkpoints and boarding gates, and the manual checking of identity documents and boarding passes.

In a provisional patent application that I coauthored with Karen Lewison before the pandemic and have now published, we proposed an automated method of verifying the identity of travelers that could be used in the post-pandemic world to speed up the security check and the boarding process, and to eliminate the face-to-face interaction with a security officer at the checkpoint and a flight attendant at the boarding gate. The method takes advantage of the high accuracy achieved by today’s deep neural networks for face recognition, while overcoming the privacy concerns raised by the collection and storage of facial images.

Here is a summary of the method.

Identity Verification: A Coronavirus Challenge to the Financial World

Updated April 1st, 2020

This blog post has been coauthored with Karen Lewison

The coronavirus pandemic is causing unprecedented disruption throughout the business world. Businesses that are not able to cope with public health orders and new customer behaviors are going out of business, while businesses that are able to adapt are thriving and expanding their market share. Disruption will be temporary in sectors of the economy where face-to-face interaction adds value to the business-to-customer relationship and a physical presence on the street is an essential requirement of the business model; gyms, bars and conference centers will no doubt reopen once the pandemic has been controlled. But changes brought by the pandemic will be permanent in sectors of the economy where face-to-face interaction adds no value and a physical presence is a legacy of a traditional business model. One of those sectors is the financial world.

A challenge to financial institutions

Financial institutions have been less impacted than other businesses by the pandemic. In the US, the entire financial sector has been declared critical infrastructure by DHS and is thus protected against closure orders by states or counties. And most financial transactions are now conducted online using web browsers or mobile apps, without face-to-face interactions that would put employees and customers at risk of contagion. Nevertheless, coronavirus poses a challenge to financial institutions: how to verify the identity of new customers.

Pomcor Granted Patent on Rich Credentials

Pomcor has been granted US Patent 10,567,377, Multifactor Privacy-Enhanced Remote Identification Using a Rich Credential. Karen Lewison is the lead inventor and I am a coinventor. Pomcor has so far been granted a total of eight patents, two of which we have sold. The remaining six patents that we own are listed in the Patents page of this web site.

This latest patent is special because it provides a solution to a major societal problem: how to identify people over the Internet with strong security. Techniques are available for authenticating repeat visitors to a web site or current users of a web application. But authentication techniques are only applicable once a relationship has been established. They are not applicable when somebody wants to establish a new relationship, e.g. by becoming a new customer of a bank, or signing up with a robo advisor, or applying for a mortgage, or renting an apartment, or switching to a different car insurance.

A New Tool Against the Surge of Application Fraud

This blog post has been coauthored with Karen Lewison

In recent posts we have been concerned with online credit card fraud and how to fight it using cardholder authentication. In this post we are concerned with another kind of financial fraud, known as application fraud or new account fraud. Both kinds of fraud have been rising after the introduction of chip cards, for reasons mentioned by Elizabeth Lasher in her article The Surge of Application Fraud:

“Due to the high volume of data breaches, Social Security numbers, mailing addresses, passwords, health history, even the name of our first pet is all for sale on the Dark Web. When you combine this phenomenon with the economic pressure applied on fraudsters to find a new cash cow after chip and signature plugged a gap in card-present fraud in the US, there is a perfect storm.”

The term “application fraud” refers to the creation of a financial account, such as a bank account or a mortgage account, with the intention to commit fraud. Application fraud can be first-party fraud, where the account is opened under the fraudster’s own identity, or third-party fraud, where the fraudster uses a stolen identity. Here we are primarily concerned with the latter.

Online Cardholder Authentication without Accessing the Card Issuer’s Site

One of the saddest failings of Internet technology is the lack of security for online credit card transactions. In in-store transactions, the cardholder authenticates by presenting the card, and card counterfeiting has been made much more difficult by the addition of a chip to the card. But in online transactions, the cardholder is still authenticated by his or her knowledge of credit card and cardholder data, a weak secret known by many.

Credit card networks have been trying to provide security for online transactions for a long time. In the nineties they proposed a complicated cryptographic protocol called SET (Secure Electronic Transactions) that was never deployed. Then they came up with a simpler protocol called 3-D Secure, where the merchant redirects the cardholder’ browser to the issuing bank, which asks the cardholder to authenticate with a password. 3-D Secure is rarely used in the US and unevenly used in other countries, due to the friction that it causes and the risk of transaction abandonment; lately some issuers have been asking for a second authentication factor, adding more friction. Now the networks have come up with version 2 of 3-D Secure, which removes friction for low risk transactions by introducing a “frictionless flow”. But the frictionless flow does not authenticate the cardholder. Instead, the merchant sends device and cardholder data to the issuer through a back channel, potentially violating the cardholder’s privacy.

Last August we wrote a blog post and a paper proposing a scheme for authenticating the cardholder without friction using a cryptographic payment credential consisting of a public key certificate and the associated private key. We have recently written a revised version of the paper with major improvements to the scheme. The paper will be presented next month at HCII 2019 in Orlando.

Pomcor Contributes Biometrics Chapter to HCI and Cybersecurity Handbook

Karen Lewison and I have contributed the chapter on Biometrics to the book Human-Computer Interaction and Cybersecurity Handbook, published by Taylor & Francis in the CRC Press series on Human Factors and Ergonomics. The editor of the paper, Abbas Moallem, has received the SJSU 2018 Author and Artist Award for the book.

Biometrics is a very complex topic because there are many biometric modalities, and different modalities use different technologies that require different scientific backgrounds for in-depth understanding. The chapter focuses on biometric verfication and packs a lot of knowledge in only 20 pages, which it organizes by identifying general concepts, matching paradigms and security architectures before diving into the details of fingerprint, iris, face and speaker verification, briefly surveying other modalities, and discussing several methods of combining modalities in biometric fusion. It emphasizes presentation attacks and mitigation methods that can be used in what will always be an arms race between impersonators and verifiers, and discusses the security and privacy implications of biometric technologies.

Feedback or questions about the chapter would be very welcome as comments on this post.

Pomcor Granted Patent on Multifactor Cryptographic Authentication

Pomcor has recently been granted US Patent 9,887,989 on a multifactor cryptographic authentication technique that uses a cryptographic key pair in conjunction with a password and/or a biometric key while protecting the password and biometric data against back-end security breaches. All our patents are available for licensing.

At the last Internet Identity Workshop we demonstrated single factor cryptographic authentication, not covered by the patent, where a key pair stored in browser local storage is used instead of a password for authentication to a web application. (A proof-of-concept implementation of a simple web app is available in the PJCL web page and described in the previous post.) Cryptographic authentication has huge advantages over password authentication, as passwords are vulnerable to back-end database breaches, phishing attacks, and password reuse at malicious or insecure sites. But when used in multifactor authentication, a password provides the unique benefit of being something that the user knows, independent of something that the user has (a device that contains a private key or is able to generate or receive one-time codes) and something that the user is (a biometric feature). Our latest patent discloses a novel multifactor authentication technique where a password can provide this benefit while being immune to the vulnerabilities of conventionally used passwords.

What kind of “encrypted fingerprint template” is used by MasterCard?

In a press release, MasterCard announced yesterday an EMV payment card that features a fingerprint reader. The release said that two trials have been recently concluded in South Africa and, after additional trials, a full roll out is expected this year.

In the United States, EMV chip cards are used without a PIN. The fingerprint reader is no doubt intended to fill that security gap. But any use of biometrics raises privacy concerns. Perhaps to address such concerns, the press release stated that a fingerprint template stored in the card is “encrypted”.

That’s puzzling. If the template is encrypted, what key is used to decrypt it before use?

Comments on the Recommended Use of Biometrics in the New Digital Identity Guidelines, NIST SP 800-63-3

NIST is working on the third revision of SP 800-63, which used to be called the Electronic Authentication Guideline and has now been renamed the Digital Identity Guidelines. An important change in the current draft of the third revision is a much expanded scope for biometrics. The following are comments by Pomcor on that aspect of the new guidelines, and more specifically on Section 5.2.3 of Part B, which we have sent to NIST in response to a call for public comments.

The draft is right in recommending the use of presentation attack detection (PAD). We think it should go farther and make PAD a mandatory requirement right away, without waiting for a future edition as stated in a note.

But the draft only considers PAD performed at the sensor. Continue reading “Comments on the Recommended Use of Biometrics in the New Digital Identity Guidelines, NIST SP 800-63-3”

Using Near-Field Communication for Remote Identity Proofing

This is the last of a four-part series of posts presenting results of a project sponsored by an SBIR Phase I grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. These posts do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the US Government.

We have just published a paper presenting the last three of the five solutions that we have identified in the research project on remote identity proofing that we are now finalizing. Solutions 3–5 use Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology for remote identity proofing. Each of the solutions uses a preexisting NFC-enabled hardware token designed for some other purpose as a credential in remote identity proofing. A native app running on an NFC-enabled mobile device serves as a relay between the NFC token and the remote verifier.

In Solution 3 the token is a contactless EMV payment card. In Solution 4, the token is a medical identification smart card containing a private key and a certificate that binds the associated public key to attributes and a facial image. In Solution 5, the token is an e-Passport with an embedded RFID chip that contains signed data comprising biographic data and a facial image.

In solutions 4 and 5 a native app submits to the verifier an audio-visual stream of the subject reading prompted text. The verifier matches the face in the video to the facial image in the NFC token, uses speech recognition technology to verify that the subject is reading the text that was prompted, and verifies that the audio and video channels of the stream are in synchrony by matching distinguishable visemes in the video channel to phonemes in the audio channel.

See also:

The Remote Identity Proofing page, with links to other materials related to the project.