Access control | EPFL Graph Search

In physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource, while access management describes the process. The act of accessing may mean consuming, entering, or using. Permission to access a resource is called authorization. Locks and login credentials are two analogous mechanisms of access control. Physical security Physical security Geographical access control may be enforced by personnel (e.g. border guard, bouncer, ticket checker), or with a device such as a turnstile. There may be fences to avoid circumventing this access control. An alternative of access control in the strict sense (physically controlling access itself) is a system of checking authorized presence, see e.g. Ticket controller (transportation). A variant is exit control, e.g. of a shop (checkout) or a country. The term access control refers to the practice of restricting entrance to a property, a building, or a room to auth

Access control and privacy in location-aware applications

Maria Luisa Damiani

The topic addressed in this thesis concerns the relationship between spatial knowledge and information protection in a mobile setting. The proliferation of mobile devices in an increasingly connected world raises growing concern for information security and privacy. For example, sensitive data recorded in corporate and networked information systems can be accessed from uncontrolled locations, downloaded on mobile terminals and disclosed to unauthorized third parties. The protection of information against improper use and modification in a mobile context poses research questions which solicit the investigation of unconventional protection strategies. In such a perspective, this thesis investigates how to provide strong control over information access based on knowledge of location and movement of individuals. Indeed, the use of spatial information for secure access support has been prospected in mid nineties, yet such a vision has not had a significant follow-up at research level. This work focuses on the definition of a comprehensive framework for the specification and enforcement of spatially-aware access control policies. Policies are spatially-aware in that the access authorization depends on the position of users. The core contribution of this work is the GEO-RBAC model, a role-based access control model that complies with current standards in access control and geo-spatial data representation. In addition, two further models have been specified, which are, to some extent, complementary to GEO-RBAC: the former is a decentralized administration model for the specification of GEO-RBAC access control policies in large organizations; the latter is a location privacy model which can be integrated into the GEO-RBAC framework to protect personal location information, for example in Location Based Services applications. The thesis addresses also issues related to the design of a system based on GEO-RBAC: an architecture has been defined based on which a prototype has been then developed. The use of geographical knowledge in security is a novel area of research and that motivates the existence of several open issues. Some of these have been discussed in the dissertation and a possible direction of research has been finally prospected for future activity.

EPFL2008

Are GAN-based Morphs Threatening Face Recognition?

Laurent Colbois, Sébastien Marcel, Eklavya Sarkar

Morphing attacks are a threat to biometric systems where the biometric reference in an identity document can be altered. This form of attack presents an important issue in applications relying on identity documents such as border security or access control. Research in generation of face morphs and their detection is developing rapidly, however very few datasets with morphing attacks and open-source detection toolkits are publicly available. This paper bridges this gap by providing two datasets and the corresponding code for four types of morphing attacks: two that rely on facial landmarks based on OpenCV and FaceMorpher, and two that use StyleGAN 2 to generate synthetic morphs. We also conduct extensive experiments to assess the vulnerability of four state-of-the-art face recognition systems, including FaceNet, VGG-Face, ArcFace, and ISV. Surprisingly, the experiments demonstrate that, although visually more appealing, morphs based on StyleGAN 2 do not pose a significant threat to the state to face recognition systems, as these morphs were outmatched by the simple morphs that are based facial landmarks.

IEEE2022

Access control and privacy in location-aware applications

Maria Luisa Damiani

EPFL2008