Biometric sensors

Biometric sensors for driver identification (mainly fingerprint for passive enter-and-go systems or for personalized comfort control). 

Ratha N.K. and Govindaraju V. (Eds.) 2008. Advances in Biometrics Sensors, Algorithms and Systems, London, Springer. 

A sensor, which measures/records a biometric characteristic or trait. 

Biometrics can be used in granting the remote access to the network. The scenario employs a common client-server network model, thus incorporating standard security mechanisms with biometric enhancements. The client terminal (see Figure 9) is a biometric-based host, equipped with the capturing device and the processing unit that measures the biometric trait and calculates the features vector (biometric template). The client capabilities may be understood in a wider sense, thus enabling the client to be equipped with sensors related to more than one biometric modality. The proposed access scenario enables to include the aliveness detection capability and the biometric replay attack prevention. To insert the necessary elements into the communication flow, capture-dependent parameters will be retrieved by the client terminal prior to the biometric trait measurement. 

C. C. Y. Poon, Y. T. Zhang, and S. D. Bao, "A novel biometrics method to secure wireless body area sensor networks for telemedicine and m-health," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 73-81,2006. 

Limited research has been reported in the literature regarding secure communications in WBANs utilizing biometric information. Venkatasubramanian et al. provided an overview of security solutions in pervasive health care systems, where biomedical information was utihzed for securing data collected by medical sensors, and for controUing access to health information managed by pervasive health care systems. Cherukuri et al. proposed a biometrics-based key distribution scheme to secure the... 

However, all the above research studies have focused on secret key distribution issues, while the specific and unique challenge in biometric authentication, ie, how to merge the payload with the biometric information while preserving the statistical uniqueness of the biometric information, has not been addressed. Furthermore, all the above-mentioned biometric-based key-exchange schemes need critical time synchronization because they need to record biometric information simultaneously at different positions of the same human body, which incurs considerable extra communication overhead in extremely resource-constrained wearable body sensor networks. In addition, one of the biometric features may not be unique and accidental faulted measures (eg, due to hardware or software failures) may malfunction the traditional biometric-based security system. 

The future work in wearable body sensor networks will be in several directions (1) provide an accurate and low-cost biometrics-based multiple model selection method to select best biometric features and modes for data authentication (2) develop a key agreement scheme that uses multiple collected dynamic biometric features as a key and share it among communication partners with low communication and computational cost (3) develop a biometric-based authentication system for textile-based body sensor networks under the low-cost key agreement scheme. 

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