Biometric Authentication Revisited Understanding the Impact of Wolves

Biometric Authentication Revisited: Understanding the Impact of Wolves in Sheep Clothing Lucas Ballard, Fabian Monrose, Daniel Lopresti USENIX Security Symposium, 2006 Presenter: Tao Li

Motivation n n To argue that previous assumption that forgers are minimally motivated and attacks can only be mounted by hand is too optimistic and even dangerous To show that the standard approach of evaluation significantly overestimates the security of the handwriting-based keygeneration system

What did the authors do? n n In this paper, the author described their initial steps toward developing evaluation methodologies for behavior biometrics that take into account threat models which have largely been ignored. Presented a generative attack model based on concatenative synthesis that can provide a rapid indication of the security afforded by the system.

Outline n n n Background Information Experimental Design Human Evaluation Generative Evaluation Conclusion

Background Information n Obtaining human input as a system security measure n n Not reproducible by attackers Eg, passwords n n n Online attacks—limited to a number of wrong attemps Offline attacks—limited only to the resources of the attackers, time & memory. When use passwords to derive cryptographic keys, susceptible to offline attacks

What is biometric? n n An alternative form of user input intended difficultly to be reproduced by attackers A technique for user to authenticate himself to a reference monitor based on biometric characteristics A means for generating user-specific cryptographic keys. Can it survive offline attacks? —Not sure Password hardening: password + biometric

Which is good biometric features? n Traditional procedure of biometric as an authenticate paradigm n n n Sampling an input from user Extracting an proper set of features Compare with previously stored templates Confirm or deny the claimed identity Good features exhibit n n Large inter-class variability Small intra-class variability

How to evaluate biometric systems? n The standard model n n n Enroll some users by collecting training samples, eg, handwriting or speech Test the rate at which users’ attempts to recreate the biometric within a predetermined tolerance fails--False Reject Rate (FRR). False Accept Rate (FAR): rate to fool the system Equal Error Rate (EER): where FRR=FAR The lower EER, the higher the accuracy.

How to evaluate biometric systems? n n n Commonly divided into naïve forgeries & skilled forgeries Missing generative models to create synthetic forgeries Evaluation is misleading under such weak security assumptions which underestimates FAR.

Handwriting Biometrics n As a first step to provide a strong methodology for evaluate performance, the authors developed a prototype toolkit using handwriting dynamics as a case in point.

Handwriting Biometrics n Offline handwriting n n A 2 -D bitmap, eg, a scan of a paper only spatial info. Features extracted from it like bounding boxes and aspect ratios, stroke densities in a particular region, curvature measurements. Online handwriting n n n Sampling the position of a stylus tip over time on digitizing tablet or pen computer temporal and spatial info. Features includes all from offline and timing and stroke order information

Experimental Design n Collect data over 2 months analyzing 6 different forgery styles n Three standard evaluation metrics n n Naïve—not really forgeries, naturally forgeries Static—created after seeing static rendering of the target user’s passphrase Dynamic—using real-time rendering Three more realistic metrics n n n Naïve*--similar to naïve, except similar writing style attacker Trained—forgeries after attackers are trained Generative—exploit info to algorithmically generate forgery

Data Collection n 11, 038 handwriting samples collected on digitized pen tablet computers from 50 users during 3 rounds

Data Collection n Round one: 1 hour, two data sets n First set established a baseline of “typical” user writing n n 5 different phrases— 2 words oxymoron, ten times each Establish biometric templates for authentication Samples for naïve and naïve* forgeries Second data set, the “generative corpus” n n To create the generative forgeries Consists of a set of 65 oxymoron

Data Collection n n Round 2, 90 min, 2 weeks later Same users wrote the 5 phases of round 1 ten times, forge representative samples of round 1 to create 2 sets of 17 forgeries n n Static forgeries—seeing only static representation Dynamic forgeries—seeing a real-time rendering of the phrase

Data Collection n Round 3, select nine users and train them n n n Exhibit a natural tendency of better forgery 3 skilled but untrained users each writing style: cursive, mixed, block Train them: forge 15 samples from their own writing styles with real-time reproduction of the target sample.

Authentication System n User’s writing sample on the electronic tablet represented by 3 signals over time n n n x(t), y(t) for location of the pen p(t) for pen up or down at time t Tablet computes a set of n statistical features (f 1, f 2, …. . fn) over the signals

Authentication System n n Based on the variation of feature values in a passphrase written m times and human natural variations, generate a n*2 matrix template {{l 1, h 1}, …. . {ln, hn}}. Compare the user sample with feature values f 1, f 2, …, fn with it. Each fj<lj or fj>hj results in an error.

Feature analysis n n Not only the entropy of each feature, but rather how difficult the feature is to forge For each feature f n n Rf: proportion of times that f was missed by legitimate users Af: proportion of times that f was missed by forgers from round 2 Q(f)=(Af-Rf+1)/2 Q(f) more closer to 1, the feature more desirable

Feature analysis n Divide feature set into temporal and spatial groups and order them based on Q(f), chose top 40 from each group and discard any with a FRR greater than 10%, finally got 15 spatial and 21 temporal features.

Human Evaluation

Human Evaluation n n At seven errors, the trained mixed, block and cursive forgers improved their FAR by 0. 47, 0. 34 and 0. 18. This improvements results from less than 2 hours’ training

Generative Evaluation n Fining and training skilled forgers is time consuming To explore the use of an automated approach using generative models as a supplementary techniques for evaluating behavioral biometrics. To investigate whether an automated approach, using a limited writing samples from the target, could match the false accept rates observed for the trained forgers

Generative Evaluation n n The approach to synthesize handwriting is to assemble a collection of basic units (n-grams) that can be combined in a concatenative fashion to mimic authentic handwriting. The basic units are obtained from n n n General population statistics Statistics specific to a demographic of the targeted user Data gathered from the targeted user

Generative Evaluation

Generative Evaluation n n Generative signature using some basic units from the database as above Original signature shown below

Generative Evaluation n n Limit 15 out of the 65 samples of target user and 15 samples of same style users Result: generative attempt only used 6. 67 target users’ writing samples and the average length of an n-gram was 1. 64 characters

Conclusion n n The authors argued in detail that current evaluation of security of biometric system is not accurate, underestimating the threat To prove this, they analyzed a handwritingbased key-generation system and show that the standard approach of evaluation significantly overestimates its security

Conclusion n n Present a generative attack model based on concatenative synthesis that automatically produce generative forgeries The generative approach matches or exceeds the effectiveness of forgeries rendered by trained humans

Weakness & Where to improve n n n The handwriting-based key-generation system needs lots of people and work. It remains unclear as to the extent to which these forgeries would fool human judges, especially forensic examiners The generative algorithm needs improvement like incorporating other parameters in it to make it more accurate.

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