April 20th 2008
I have moved some material about multilevel security (MLS) and ‘cross domain systems’ (CDS) onto this web site from my old Cryptosmith site. I’ve also included some brief comments on CDS. There is also a link to my MLS Introduction, which I will be updating and migrating to this site over the next few months.
I’m not collecting comments on static pages if I can help it, so if you have the need to comment on my MLS or CDS materials, post the comment here.
April 20th 2008
Blog maintenance is ‘easy’ compared so some computing tasks, but it’s very persnickety and prone to error. I’ve made a few customizations and I can’t wait to see which ones survived the update.
April 17th 2008
Yesterday the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota (just up the street) hosted a talk by Anil Jain, who has done a lot of work on pattern matching, biometrics in general, and fingerprints in particular.
Most of the talk was a typical biometrics briefing: what it’s about, how the technology works, the problems it’s supposed to solve, and so on. Toward the end he presented several interesting things that were more or less new to me:
1. A recent paper on which Jain is 3rd co-author seems to claim that the classic ‘12 point match’ with a latent print could have an error rate of about 1 in 4,400.
2. If you have a collection of “fingerprint patterns” for biometric matching, you can indeed use the patterns to build fingerprint images that match those patterns. This is something that many biometric companies have claimed to be impractical, if not impossible.
3 . A student of Jain’s is working on practical techniques to ‘hash’ fingerprint patterns. Such a hash would allow a system to match a fingerprint to a hashed pattern, yet not provide the right information for constructing a matchable fingerprint. Continue Reading »