The extraordinary speed with which new models of communication and computing technologies have advanced over the last few years is mind boggling. New exciting opportunities are emerging all the time to facilitate high volume of global commercial activities, enable the citizens to enjoy convenient services as well as mobile leisure activities. These exciting opportunities and benefits come with increased concerns about security and privacy due to a plethora of reasons mostly caused by blurring of control over own data. Conventional access control to personal/organisational data assets use presumed reliable and secure mechanisms including biometric authentication, but little attention is paid to privacy of participants. Moreover, digitally stored files of online transactions include traceable personal data/reference. Recent increase in serious hacking incidents deepens the perception of lack of privacy. The emerging concept of personal and biometric data de-identification seem to provide the most promising approach to deal with this challenge. This chapter is concerned with constructing and using personalised random projections (RPs) for secure transformation of biometric templates into a domain from which it is infeasible to retrieve the owner identity. We shall describe the implications of the rapid changes in communication models on the characteristics of privacy, and describe the role that RP is, and can, play within biometric data de-identification for improved privacy in general and for cloud services in particular.

Chapter Contents:

• 12.1 Introduction
• 12.2 Evolution of privacy threats
• 12.2.1 Pre-cloud privacy
• 12.2.2 Post-cloud privacy
• 12.2.3 Towards a privacy protection strategy
• 12.3 The dual role of biometrics in privacy protection
• 12.3.1 Face biometrics
• 12.3.2 Speaker recognition
• 12.4 De-identification of biometric data
• 12.4.1 Existing face image de-identification
• 12.4.2 Biometric template protection schemes
• 12.4.2.1 Feature transformation schemes
• 12.4.2.2 Biometric cryptosystems
• 12.4.2.3 Towards hybrid biometric data de-identification
• 12.5 Random projections
• 12.5.1 RP generation schemes
• 12.5.1.1 The Gram—Schmidt orthonormalisation (GSO) algorithm
• 12.5.1.2 An alternative scheme for RP generation
• 12.5.2 Construction of Hadamard matrices
• 12.5.3 Hadamard-based RP dictionaries for de-identification ofbiometric data
• 12.5.4 Analytical notes on the performance and security of blockdiagonal Hadamard RP
• 12.6 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: information retrieval; message authentication; data privacy; computer crime; biometrics (access control); mobile computing; cloud computing

Other keywords: mobile leisure activities; cloud services; random projections; increased privacy; RP; hacking incidents; biometric authentication; owner identity retrieval; biometric templates

Subjects: Data security; Internet software; Mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing; Information retrieval techniques