Huo-Chong Ling

Secure Encrypted Steganography Graphical Password scheme for Near Field Communication smartphone access control system

We propose a two-factor authentication access control system using NFC smartphone.First credential is steganography key on NFC smartphone (ownership).Second credential is Encrypted Steganography Graphical Password scheme (knowledge).Integration of both credentials provides higher security to access control system.Evaluation shows users weigh security as a dominant attribute to use the system. The revolutionary development of smartphone which offers compelling computing and storage capabilities has radically changed the digital lifestyles of users. The integration of Near Field Communication (NFC) into smartphone has further opened up opportunities for new applications and business models such as in industry for payment, electronic ticketing and access control systems. NFC and graphical password scheme are two imperative technologies that can be used to achieve secure and convenient access control system. One of the potential uses of such technologies is the integration of steganography graphical password scheme into NFC-enabled smartphone to transcend conventional digital key/tokens access control systems into a more secure and convenient environment. Smartphone users would have more freedom in customizing the security level and how they interact with the access control system. As such, this paper presents a secure two-factor authentication NFC smartphone access control system using digital key and the proposed Encrypted Steganography Graphical Password (ESGP). This paper also validates the user perception and behavioral intention to use NFC ESGP smartphone access control system through an experiment and user evaluation survey. Results indicated that users weigh security as a dominant attribute for their behavioral intention to use NFC ESGP smartphone access control system. Our findings offer a new insight for security scholars, mobile device service providers and expert systems to leverage on the two-factor authentication with the use of NFC-enabled smartphone.

Monogenic Riesz wavelet representation for micro-expression recognition

A monogenic signal is a two-dimensional analytical signal that provides the local information of magnitude, phase, and orientation. While it has been applied on the field of face and expression recognition [1], [2], [3], there are no known usages for subtle facial micro-expressions. In this paper, we propose a feature representation method which succinctly captures these three low-level components at multiple scales. Riesz wavelet transform is employed to obtain multi-scale monogenic wavelets, which are formulated by quaternion representation. Instead of summing up the multi-scale monogenic representations, we consider all monogenic representations across multiple scales as individual features. For classification, two schemes were applied to integrate these multiple feature representations: a fusion-based method which combines the features efficiently and discriminately using the ultra-fast, optimized Multiple Kernel Learning (UFO-MKL) algorithm; and concatenation-based method where the features are combined into a single feature vector and classified by a linear SVM. Experiments carried out on a recent spontaneous micro-expression database demonstrated the capability of the proposed method in outperforming the state-of-the-art monogenic signal approach to solving the micro-expression recognition problem.

NFC smartphone based access control system using information hiding

A digital access control system allows users to access a premise using an access card. It is introduced as an alternative system to the most common access control system using physical keys and mechanical locks to increase the level of convenience to access a premise. However, an intruder is able to gain access to the premise if he/she possesses the access card or the physical keys. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an access control system that utilizes near field communication (NFC) smartphone and information hiding technique to overcome the disadvantage mentioned previously on the existing systems. The first protection level is NFC smartphone and NFC reader or tag to initiate the access control to the premise. The second protection level is the information hiding technique to embed access passcode into the users photo to obtain an encoded photo, which is also known as stego-photo. The access passcode in the stego-photo is later extracted using information hiding technique during the door access stage for verification of the legitimate user. An automated door is developed and NFC reader or tag is located near the door. The interaction between NFC smartphone and NFC reader or tag enables prompting of the correct stego-photo to be selected using the smartphone to perform the user authentication process. The door is unlocked if the access passcode extracted from the stego-photo matches with the access passcode in the database located at the server. If otherwise, alarm is triggered and a light emitting diode (LED) is turned on. The lighted LED acts as an indicator to give an alert to the user that someone has tried to break into his/her house when he/she is not around.

Network packet payload parity based steganography

Network steganography is an emerging research field, which exploits packet protocol headers, protocol mechanism, packet payload, etc. to establish secret communication between two parties over a computer network. The detection of such hidden communication has not been part of intrusion detection systems that are primarily used to detect malicious activities such as viruses and malwares. In this paper, we propose two packet-length based steganographic techniques to implement a covert channel. We examine and analyze the packet lengths of normal traffic to show that our techniques can cope with traffic anomaly detection methods and does not introduce noticeable traffic overhead.

Real-time high-resolution downsampling algorithm on many-core processor for spatially scalable video coding

Abstract. The progression toward spatially scalable video coding (SVC) solutions for ubiquitous endpoint systems introduces challenges to sustain real-time frame rates in downsampling high-resolution videos into multiple layers. In addressing these challenges, we put forward a hardware accelerated downsampling algorithm on a parallel computing platform. First, we investigate the principal architecture of a serial downsampling algorithm in the Joint-Scalable-Video-Model reference software to identify the performance limitations for spatially SVC. Then, a parallel multicore-based downsampling algorithm is studied as a benchmark. Experimental results for this algorithm using an 8-core processor exhibit performance speedup of 5.25× against the serial algorithm in downsampling a quantum extended graphics array at 1536p video resolution into three lower resolution layers (i.e., Full-HD at 1080p, HD at 720p, and Quarter-HD at 540p). However, the achieved speedup here does not translate into the minimum required frame rate of 15 frames per second (fps) for real-time video processing. To improve the speedup, a many-core based downsampling algorithm using the compute unified device architecture parallel computing platform is proposed. The proposed algorithm increases the performance speedup to 26.14× against the serial algorithm. Crucially, the proposed algorithm exceeds the target frame rate of 15 fps, which in turn is advantageous to the overall performance of the video encoding process.

Android based self-diagnostic electrocardiogram system for mobile healthcare

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death worldwide and are characterized by arrhythmia (i.e. irregular rhythm of heartbeat). Arrhythmia occasionally happens under certain conditions, such as stress. Therefore, it is difficult to be diagnosed using electrocardiogram (ECG) devices available in hospitals for just a few minutes. Constant diagnosis and monitoring of heartbeat is required to reduce death caused by cardiovascular diseases. OBJECTIVE Mobile healthcare system has emerged as a potential solution to assist patients in monitoring their own heart condition, especially those who are isolated from the reference hospital. This paper proposes a self-diagnostic electrocardiogram system for mobile healthcare that has the capability to perform a real-time ECG diagnostic. METHODS The self-diagnostic capability of a real-time ECG signal is achieved by implementing a detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) method. The result obtained from DFA is used to display the patients health condition on a smartphone anytime and anywhere. If the health condition is critical, the system will alert the patient and his medical practitioner for further diagnosis. RESULTS Experimental results verified the validity of the developed ECG diagnostic application on a smartphone. CONCLUSION The proposed system can potentially reduce death caused by cardiovascular diseases by alerting the patient possibly undergoing a heart attack.

Flaws in generic watermarking protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs

Recently, two generic watermarking protocols were proposed, based on a popular zero-knowledge identification protocol. In this paper, we show that both protocols are flawed and therefore fail to achieve their purpose of allowing a prover to prove to a verifier of his ownership of a watermarked image. We also give some suggestions to fix these flaws.

Using IP identification for fragmentation resilient data embedding

In this work, we propose a fragmentation resilient IP identification based data embedding method. First, we analyze the IP identification generation in various operating systems to validate the feasibility of our proposal. Then, we put forward our proposal to embed data into IP identification field while considering data from the payload field. Results suggest that the proposed method resembles the ordinary IP identification generation pattern and can mitigate the problem of packet fragmentation.

On the security of a robust watermarking scheme based on RDWT-SVD

Image watermarking schemes allow a cover image to be embedded with a watermark for diverse applications, such as copyright protection and covert communication. Recently, a hybrid image watermarking scheme based on redundant discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition is proposed by Lagzian et al. This scheme demonstrates high robustness against common image processing attacks such as geometric attack, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise and histogram equalization. In this paper, we present a fundamental flaw in the scheme that leads to false-positive detection problem and hence, undermines the robustness and suitability of the scheme to be used as a proof of ownership application.

Attacks on a Blind Signature-Based Steganographic Protocol of IEEE-WISP 2001

We consider the security of a steganographic (or watermarking) protocol based on blind signatures proposed by Lenti et al. at WISP 2001. We remark that it is one that is a simple modification of existing blind signature schemes where the message to be signed blindly is replaced with an image to be watermarked. In this paper, we show that the trusted third party who signs the image blindly could be falsely led by an attacker to sign an image that is entirely different from the original. Besides, another well-known attack based on the multiplicative property of the RSA also applies here.