Towards secure cloud-centric Internet of Biometric Things

Mobile platforms have recently been integrated with biometric identification methods such as fingerprint and/or voice recognition. However the rich contextual information carried on these platforms have not been a part of identification. Connected user devices, and mobile applications that run on those devices are prone to security vulnerabilities as a result of unauthorized access. In this paper, we present the Internet of Biometric Things (IoBT) concept that is a cloud-centric biometric identification architecture consisting of connected devices that require bio-metric authentication. The cloud-centric authentication in IoBT couples biometric and context-aware authentication techniques to protect mobile applications from unauthorized access by malicious users. Thus, existing local password and fingerprint based authentication is strengthened by cloud-centric knowledge-based spatiotemporal abstraction to obtain the context such as location, use of cellular data, use of WiFi data, number, timestamp and duration of received/placed calls and SMSs. We present the concept of enabling identification of fraud using cloud-centric context-awareness and local resources-based biometrics on mobile platforms. Furthermore, the benefits of the proposed concept is discussed in detail in comparison to existing authentication and identification techniques that rely on local computing resources on mobile devices.