Subproject PDC1.1: Biometric Sensing and Authentication
Historically, personal relationships, face-to-face contract signings, notaries, and third party counsel are used to help establish trust. As the reliance on paper shifts to electronic transactions and documents, so must the reliance on traditional trust factors shift to electronic security measures to authenticate before engaging in the exchange of information, goods and services. Similarly, the need for confidentiality and confidence in the integrity of exchanged information is critical.

Subproject PDC1.2: Cryptographic Methods
Many modern cryptosystems are based on the difficulty of number-theoretic problems. (E.g. public-key RSA). Although practical experience with the known algorithms for solving these problems suggests that their solutions are intrinsically difficult, no rigid proof of that is known thus far. Therefore, it is necessary to spend continuous research efforts on the study, improvement and analysis of existing algorithms and the development of new algorithms for the solution of the number-theoretic problems, which underlie modern cryptosystems. This contributes to a permanent validation of these cryptosystems, enlarges their reliability, and keeps up-to-date our scientific and practical knowledge about the best possible attacks to these systems.

Subproject PDC1.3: Protocols for Secure Infrastructure and E-commerce
We aim at developing a system and a methodology for the engineering of provably secure (multicast) negotiation protocols. A theoretical foundation for handling the multicast and negotiation aspects has to be developed, as well as algorithms for the specification, prototyping and verification of such protocols. There are several problems that we have to tackle: Verifying multicast protocols, developing e-commerce protocols that are secure and fair, improving the tool support for the verification of security protocols, and digital rights management.

Industrial cooperation
We cooperate with: Innovista Security BV on intelligent management of surveillance cameras; Siemens Nederland on electronic surveillance of detainee; Hoffmann BV in Almere on carving of large data files, for supporting the police in the investigation of criminal activities.

International cooperation
PDC1.1 cooperates with the European BioSecure NoE (with U. of Vigo, Spain and the U. of Sassari, Italy). In 2006 PhD student Tavenard (Ecole Normale Super-ieure in Cachan) has joined PDC1.1. PDC1.3 will start a close collaboration with the new group on security at U. of Luxemburg. PhD student Jonker will be part-time seconded to that group. Corin is collaborating with Abadi at the U. of California Santa Cruz.

Highlights 2004-2006
Research highlights
In 2005 and 2006, Schouten presented two master classes on Biometrical Systems and Applications at the Summer School for Advanced Studies on Biometrics for Secure Authentication in Alghero, Italy. In 2005, Corin, Saptawijaya and Etalle introduced the new logic PS-LTL to formally verify properties for security protocols. In 2006, Jonker, Torabi Dashti and Krishnan Nair formally verified a protocol for digital rights management developed at the Free University in the group of Andy Tanenbaum.

Economic & societal impact
In our new "senselab" (co-financed with a BASIS IOP project) we experiment with authentication processes in smart environments using distributed sensor networks. In August 2006, Innovista Security BV en CWI signed an understanding of cooperation on video monitoring for security and marketing applications. Innovista and CWI will work together on the senselab environment.

Future work 2007-2009
New research is being started on Biometric Sensing, dedicated to the fusion and interpretation of multiple measurements of one biometric modality over time as well as the integration of different modalities originating from different sensors.. PDC1.3 will focus on protocols for digital rights management, and the verification of e-commerce protocols using CLP.

For more information, please refer to the publications and posters of this project.