Biblio
Wearable and mobile medical devices provide efficient, comfortable, and economic health monitoring, having a wide range of applications from daily to clinical scenarios. Health data security becomes a critically important issue. Electrocardiogram (ECG) has proven to be a potential biometric in human recognition over the past decade. Unlike conventional authentication methods using passwords, fingerprints, face, etc., ECG signal can not be simply intercepted, duplicated, and enables continuous identification. However, in many of the studies, algorithms developed are not suitable for practical application, which usually require long ECG data for authentication. In this work, we introduce a two-phase authentication using artificial neural network (NN) models. This algorithm enables fast authentication within only 3 seconds, meanwhile achieves reasonable performance in recognition. We test the proposed method in a controlled laboratory experiment with 50 subjects. Finger ECG signals are collected using a mobile device at different times and physical statues. At the first stage, a ``General'' NN model is constructed based on data from the cohort and used for preliminary screening, while at the second stage ``Personal'' NN models constructed from single individual's data are applied as fine-grained identification. The algorithm is tested on the whole data set, and on different sizes of subsets (5, 10, 20, 30, and 40). Results proved that the proposed method is feasible and reliable for individual authentication, having obtained average False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR) below 10% for the whole data set.
The chaotic system and cryptography have some common features. Due to the close relationship between chaotic system and cryptosystem, researchers try to combine the chaotic system with cryptosystem. In this study, security analysis of an encryption algorithm which aims to encrypt the data with ECG signals and chaotic functions was performed using the Logistic map in text encryption and Henon map in image encryption. In the proposed algorithm, text and image data can be encrypted at the same time. In addition, ECG signals are used to determine the initial conditions and control parameters of the chaotic functions used in the algorithm to personalize of the encryption algorithm. In this cryptanalysis study, the inadequacy of the mentioned process and the weaknesses of the proposed method have been determined. Encryption algorithm has not sufficient capacity to provide necessary security level of key space and secret key can be obtained with only one plaintext/ciphertext pair with chosen-plaintext attack.
As a plethora of wearable devices are being introduced, significant concerns exist on the privacy and security of personal data stored on these devices. Expanding on recent works of using electrocardiogram (ECG) as a modality for biometric authentication, in this work, we investigate the possibility of using personal ECG signals as the individually unique source for physical unclonable function (PUF), which eventually can be used as the key for encryption and decryption engines. We present new signal processing and machine learning algorithms that learn and extract maximally different ECG features for different individuals and minimally different ECG features for the same individual over time. Experimental results with a large 741-subject in-house ECG database show that the distributions of the intra-subject (same person) Hamming distance of extracted ECG features and the inter-subject Hamming distance have minimal overlap. 256-b random numbers generated from the ECG features of 648 (out of 741) subjects pass the NIST randomness tests.