Gina Gallegos-García

Electronic Voting Using Identity Based Cryptography

Today voting processes are the most important element of democracy as the society´s way to make decisions. Such processes have been influenced by information technologies until becoming be named electronic voting. This topic has been an active research area, on which, cryptographic primitives are used in order to propose secure protocols. Most of them use a Public Key Infrastructure. In this paper, we propose the use of Bilinear Pairings, first implementation of Identity Based Cryptography, in order to provide stronger security requirements than protocols based on Public Key Infastructure and without requiring the entire infrastructure needed by them. We make a comparative analysis of our proposal with previous proposals, which is based on the total number of needed key pairs and required authorities by those protocols.

Private eyes: Secure remote biometric authentication

We propose an efficient remote biometric authentication protocol that gives strong protection to the users biometric data in case of two common kinds of security breaches: (1) loss or theft of the users token (smart card, handheld device, etc.), giving the attacker full access to any secrets embedded within it; (2) total penetration of the server. Only if both client and server are simultaneously compromised is the users biometric data vulnerable to exposure. The protocol works by encrypting the users biometric template in a way that allows it to be used for authentication without being decrypted by either token or server. Further, the encrypted template never leaves the token, and only the server has the information that would enable it to be decrypted. We have implemented our protocol using two iris recognition libraries and evaluated its performance. The overall efficiency and recognition performance is essentially the same compared to an unprotected biometric system.

Accelerometer Based Body Area Network Sensor Authentication

In recent years, the increasing number of wearable sensors by humans can serve for many purposes like emergency care, health care remote monitoring, personal entertainment and communication. In the case of health care applications, wearable sensors enable long-term continuous physiological monitoring without disturbing day to day activities, which is important for the treatment and management of many chronic illnesses, neurological disorders, and mental health issues. Examples include: diabetes, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), depression, drug addiction, and anxiety disorders. In general, wearable sensors can be used individually or as networked systems. In any case, sensors communication and authentication are key aspects in the deployment of these systems. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is created by wearing small sensors on the human body. To ensure authentication in on-body sensor networks, a mechanism which intuitively proves that all the communicating nodes are trusted ones is required. In order to achieve sensor authentication, in this paper a technological approach where accelerometer data gathered from sensors are used to distinguish whether or not the devices are carried on the same individual’s body, is presented. This system detects this situation by calculating the correlations between embedded accelerometers in a cellphone and accelerometer sensors. We evaluate our method over a dataset of fifteen wearers with sensors in various positions on their body.