To combat rising security challenges, the global market for biometric technologies is growing at a fast pace. It includes all processes used to recognise, authenticate and identify persons based on biological and/or behavioural characteristics. The EU-funded TReSPAsS-ETN project will deliver a new type of security protection (through generalised presentation attack detection (PAD) technologies) and privacy preservation (through computationally feasible encryption solutions).The TReSPAsS-ETN Marie Skłodowska-Curie early training network will couple specific technical and transferable skills training including entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, management and communications with secondments to industry. The project is funded by EU.

Wearable and ubiquitous computing will create a wave of adoption similar to smartphones, enabling new applications in areas such as smart homes and healthcare. They collect unique information about each individual and can offer transparent authentication. However they have weak security and scatter our digital fingerprints across different services. PRECIS has the ambitious goal to address this challenge and to introduce a unifying framework for authentication in wearable computing that provides: (i) accurate and transparent authentication, (ii) rigorous privacy guarantees, even if multiple wearable devices are involved in the authentication. PRECIS is funded by the [Swedish Research Council (VR)]

The next generation of wireless systems is expected to turn wireless connectivity into a true commodity '...for anything that may benefit from being connected...', ranging from tiny wearable sensors to vehicles and drones. A successful implementation of this internet-of-things (IoT) vision calls for a wireless communication system that: (i) is able to support a much larger number of connected devices, (ii) is able to fulfil much more stringent requirements on latency and reliability, and (iii) offers more sophisticated privacy-preserving authentication and security mechanisms. The introduction of future services based on machine-type communication, such as intelligent transportation, augmented reality, remote health care, smart metering, and industrial automation heavily rely on the availability of such a wireless communication system. Indeed all these services require a reliable and low-latency wireless connectivity with strong security and privacy guarantees. The central objective of SEAFRONT is to determine the minimum end-to-end latency that can be guaranteed in wireless communication links where short data packets need to be transmitted with high requirements on reliability, security, and privacy. This is a collaborative project at Chalmers between the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Signals and Systems funded by Chalmers ICT Areas of Advance.

Communication technologies have changed the way we do business, travel, manage our personal lives and communicate with our friends. In many cases, this crucially depends on accurate and reliable authentication. We need to get authenticated in order to get access to restricted services and/or places. The overall goal of the project is to develop privacy-preserving authentication mechanisms for noisy, constrained and hostile environments that strike an optimal balance of reliable (accurate) authentication, privacy-preservation and resource consumption. Authentication is especially challenging when it appears under constrained settings due to: (i) privacy issues, (ii) noisy conditions, and (iii) resource limits. Privacy-preservation is essential for the protection of sensitive information (i.e. diseases, location, nationality). Noisy conditions refer to physical noise in the communication channel that may lead to modification of the transmitted information, or natural variability due to the authentication medium (e.g. fingerprint scans). Resource constraints refer to limited device power/abilities (i.e. sensors, RFID tags). The project is funded by Chalmers ICT Areas of Advance.

The goal of this project is to explore practical security approaches for cross-layer authentication by employing mechanisms operating at the physical layer of wireless communication, in combination with conventional cryptography. This combination shall enable new authentication protocols for a variety of low-resource wireless devices. Cross-layer protocol design could solve important security challenges in ad-hoc wireless environments that cannot effectively be solved only with conventional cryptography, such as relay-resistant authentication. Cross-layer security protocol design has the potential to bring about benefits in wireless networks where computational and power resources are constrained, or where communication needs to be made robust for purposes of reliability and fault tolerance. This project will focus on the design and implementation of efficient authentication mechanisms, specifically distance-bounding protocols, that can be employed to verify the physical proximity of the party that is authenticated in wireless ad-hoc networks, such as wireless sensor networks and NFC-enabled mobile device communication. The partners of this project are: Chalmers University of Technology and City University of Hong Kong. The project is funded by STINT. More info about a workshop organised and funded by this STINT project is available here.

Recent technological advances in hardware and software have irrevocably affected the classical picture of computing systems. Today, these no longer consist only of connected servers, but involve a wide range of pervasive and embedded devices, leading to the concept of "ubiquitous computing systems".The objective of the Action is to improve and adapt the existent cryptanalysis methodologies and tools to the ubiquitous computing framework. Cryptanalysis, which is the assessment of theoretical and practical cryptographic mechanisms designed to ensure security and privacy, will be implemented along four axes: cryptographic models, cryptanalysis of building blocks, hardware and software security engineering, and security assessment of real-world systems. The project is funded by the EU Cost. More info about the project is available here.

Intrusion detection techniques can safeguard wireless communications and reduce the impact of malicious activities that cannot be prevented via cryptographic or other security measures. The goal of PPIDR was to investigate intrusion detection and response techniques in wireless ad hoc networks and especially WSN and RFID systems. In wireless ad hoc networks, the malicious status of nodes is uncertain. The second goal was to respond to suspected intrusions in a way that optimally balances the promptness of warnings, the reliability of decisions and the network performance. The third goal was to extend intrusion detection and response mechanisms to the adversarial case: i.e. the case where the attacker is behaving in a rational manner in order to more effectively evade it. Recent advances in this area make this a particularly interesting avenue of investigation. Our research focused on making such algorithms practical and evaluating them in various traffic conditions and types of attacks. Because of the potential privacy implications of monitoring large numbers of users and network nodes our research will also devote considerable effort to safeguard the privacy of the involved parties and develop privacy-preserving intrusion detection and response systems, based on recent developments in the areas of privacy-preserving data mining, inference and database systems. This project was funded by a Marie Curie IE Fellowship (EU FP7) and was performed at EPFL. More info about the project is available here.