Biometrics have been used increasingly heavily for identity authentication in many critical public services, such as border passes or security check points. However, traditional biometrics-based identity management systems collect and store personal biometrical data in a centralized server or database, and an individual has no control over how her biometrics will be used for what purpose. Such kind of systems can result in serious security and privacy issues for sensitive personal data. In this paper, we design a novel approach to leveraging biometrics and blockchain/smart contract to enable secure and privacy preserving identity management. The basic idea is to use blockchain to store an authority's attestation and the transformed value of an individual's biometrics. The stored data on the blockchain is then controlled by smart contracts which define various access control policies, e.g., access parties, access times, etc. The owner of the biometrical data can flexibly change the access control policies through a white list, a timer and other methods to any identity verifiers. We used the well-known Ethereum platform to implement the proposed approach and tested the effectiveness as well as the flexibility of various access control policies.
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Detecting Safety and Security Faults in PLC Systems with Data Provenance
Programmable Logic Controllers are an integral component for managing many different industrial processes (e.g., smart building management, power generation, water and wastewater management, and traffic control systems), and manufacturing and control industries (e.g., oil and natural gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, food and beverage, automotive, and aerospace). Despite being used widely in many critical infrastructures, PLCs use protocols which make these control systems vulnerable to many common attacks, including man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service attacks, and memory corruption attacks (e.g., array, stack, and heap overflows, integer overflows, and pointer corruption). In this paper, we propose PLC-PROV, a system for tracking the inputs and outputs of the control system to detect violations in the safety and security policies of the system. We consider a smart building as an example of a PLC-based system and show how PLC-PROV can be applied to ensure that the inputs and outputs are consistent with the intended safety and security policies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757884
- PAR ID:
- 10135010
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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