Minutiae pattern extraction plays a crucial role in fingerprint registration and identification for electronic applications. However, the extraction accuracy is seriously compromised by the presence of contaminated ridge lines and complex background scenarios. General image processing-based methods, which rely on many prior hypotheses, fail to effectively handle minutiae extraction in complex scenarios. Previous works have shown that CNN-based methods can perform well in object detection tasks. However, the deep neural networks (DNNs)-based methods are restricted by the limitation of public labeled datasets due to legitimate privacy concerns. To address these challenges comprehensively, this paper presents a fully automated minutiae extraction method leveraging DNNs. Firstly, we create a fingerprint minutiae dataset using a semi-automated minutiae annotation algorithm. Subsequently, we propose a minutiae extraction model based on Residual Networks (Resnet) that enables end-to-end prediction of minutiae. Moreover, we introduce a novel non-maximal suppression (NMS) procedure, guided by the Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) metric, during the inference phase to effectively handle outliers. Experimental evaluations conducted on the NIST SD4 and FVC 2004 databases demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art minutiae extraction approaches.

The fingerprint verification system is widely used in mobile devices because of fingerprint's distinctive features and ease of capture. Typically, mobile devices utilize small sensors, which have limited area, to capture fingerprint. Meanwhile, conventional fingerprint feature extraction methods need detailed fingerprint information, which is unsuitable for those small sensors. This paper proposes a novel fingerprint verification method for small area sensors based on deep learning. A systematic method combines deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in a Siamese network for feature extraction and XGBoost for fingerprint similarity training. In addition, a padding technique also introduced to avoid wraparound error problem. Experimental results show that the method achieves an improved accuracy of 66.6% and 22.6% in the FingerPassDB7 and FVC2006DB1B dataset, respectively, compared to the existing methods.

In this paper, we compare performances of train localization schemes by the dynamic programming of various sensor information obtained from a smartphone attached to a train, and further discuss the most superior sensor information and scheme in this localization system. First, we compare the localization performances of single sensor information schemes, such as 3-axis acceleration information, acoustic information, 3-axis magnetic information, and barometric pressure information. These comparisons reveal that the lateral acceleration information input scheme has the best localization performance. Furthermore, we optimize each data fusion scheme and compare the localization performances of the data-fusion schemes using the optimal ratio of coefficients. The results show that the hybrid scheme has the best localization performance, with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 12.2 m. However, there are no differences between the RMSEs of the input fusion scheme and 3-axis acceleration input scheme in the most significant three digits. Consequently, we conclude that the 3-axis acceleration input fusion scheme is the most reasonable in terms of simplicity.

With the widespread use of indoor positioning technology, the need for high-precision positioning services is rising; nevertheless, there are several challenges, such as the difficulty of simulating the distribution of interior location data and the enormous inaccuracy of probability computation. As a result, this paper proposes three different neural network model comparisons for indoor location based on WiFi fingerprint - indoor location algorithm based on improved back propagation neural network model, RSSI indoor location algorithm based on neural network angle change, and RSSI indoor location algorithm based on depth neural network angle change - to raise accurately predict indoor location coordinates. Changing the action range of the activation function in the standard back-propagation neural network model achieves the goal of accurately predicting location coordinates. The revised back-propagation neural network model has strong stability and enhances indoor positioning accuracy based on experimental comparisons of loss rate (loss), accuracy rate (acc), and cumulative distribution function (CDF).

We propose GConvLoc, a WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization method utilizing graph convolutional networks. Using the graph structure, we can consider the fingerprint data of the reference points and their location labels in addition to the fingerprint data of the test point at inference time. Experimental results show that GConvLoc outperforms baseline methods that do not utilize graphs.

Increased demand for DNS privacy has driven the creation of several encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS over HTTPS (DoH), DNS over TLS (DoT), and DNS over QUIC (DoQ). Recently, DoT and DoH have been deployed by some vendors like Google and Cloudflare. This paper addresses privacy leakage in these three encrypted DNS protocols (especially DoQ) with different DNS recursive resolvers (Google, NextDNS, and Bind) and DNS proxy (AdGuard). More particularly, we investigate encrypted DNS traffic to determine whether the adversary can infer the category of websites users visit for this purpose. Through analyzing packet traces of three encrypted DNS protocols, we show that the classification performance of the websites (i.e., user's privacy leakage) is very high in terms of identifying 42 categories of the websites both in public (Google and NextDNS) and local (Bind) resolvers. By comparing the case with cache and without cache at the local resolver, we confirm that the caching effect is negligible as regards identification. We also show that discriminative features are mainly related to the inter-arrival time of packets for DNS resolving. Indeed, we confirm that the F1 score decreases largely by removing these features. We further investigate two possible countermeasures that could affect the inter-arrival time analysis in the local resolver: AdBlocker and DNS prefetch. However, there is no significant improvement in results with these countermeasures. These findings highlight that information leakage is still possible even in encrypted DNS traffic regardless of underlying protocols (i.e., HTTPS, TLS, QUIC).

Federated learning is a promising strategy for indoor localization that can reduce the labor cost of constructing a fingerprint dataset in a distributed training manner without privacy disclosure. However, the traffic generated during the whole training process of federated learning is a burden on the up-and-down link, which leads to huge energy consumption for mobile devices. Moreover, the non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) problem impairs the global localization performance during the federated learning. This paper proposes a communication-efficient FedAvg method for federated indoor localization which is improved by the layerwise asynchronous aggregation strategy and layerwise swapping training strategy. Energy efficiency can be improved by performing asynchronous aggregation between the model layers to reduce the traffic cost in the training process. Moreover, the impact of the Non-IID problem on the localization performance can be mitigated by performing swapping training on the deep layers. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed methods reduce communication traffic and improve energy efficiency significantly while mitigating the impact of the Non-IID problem on the precision of localization.

The altered fingerprints help criminals escape from police and cause great harm to the society. In this letter, an altered fingerprint detection method is proposed. The method is constructed by two deep convolutional neural networks to train the time-domain and frequency-domain features. A spectral attention module is added to connect two networks. After the extraction network, a feature fusion module is then used to exploit relationship of two network features. We make ablation experiments and add the module proposed in some popular architectures. Results show the proposed method can improve the performance of altered fingerprint detection compared with the recent neural networks.

Website Fingerprinting (WF) enables a passive attacker to identify which website a user is visiting over an encrypted tunnel. Current WF attacks have two strong assumptions: (i) specific tunnel, i.e., the attacker can train on traffic samples collected in a simulated tunnel with the same tunnel settings as the user, and (ii) pseudo-open-world, where the attacker has access to training samples of unmonitored sites and treats them as a separate class. These assumptions, while experimentally feasible, render WF attacks less usable in practice. In this paper, we present Gene Fingerprinting (GF), a new WF attack that achieves cross-tunnel transferability by generating fingerprints that reflect the intrinsic profile of a website. The attack leverages Zero-shot Learning — a machine learning technique not requiring training samples to identify a given class — to reduce the effort to collect data from different tunnels and achieve a real open-world. We demonstrate the attack performance using three popular tunneling tools: OpenSSH, Shadowsocks, and OpenVPN. The GF attack attains over 94% accuracy on each tunnel, far better than existing CUMUL, DF, and DDTW attacks. In the more realistic open-world scenario, the attack still obtains 88% TPR and 9% FPR, outperforming the state-of-the-art attacks. These results highlight the danger of our attack in various scenarios where gathering and training on a tunnel-specific dataset would be impractical.

This paper evaluates the bluetooth low energy (BLE) positioning systems using the sparse-training data through the comparison experiments. The sparse-training data is extracted from the database including enough data for realizing the highly accurate and precise positioning. First, we define the sparse-training data, i.e., the data collection time and the number of smartphones, directions, beacons, and reference points, on BLE positioning systems. Next, the positioning performance evaluation experiments are conducted in two indoor environments, that is, an indoor corridor as a one-dimensionally spread environment and a hall as a twodimensionally spread environment. The algorithms for comparison are the conventional fingerprint algorithm and the hybrid algorithm (the authors already proposed, and combined the proximity algorithm and the fingerprint algorithm). Based on the results, we confirm that the hybrid algorithm performs well in many cases even when using sparse-training data. Consequently, the robustness of the hybrid algorithm, that the authors already proposed for the sparse-training data, is shown.

With the arrival of 5G and the popularity of smart devices, indoor localization technical feasibility has been verified, and its market demands is huge. The channel state information (CSI) extracted from Wi-Fi is physical layer information which is more fine-grained than the received signal strength indication (RSSI). This paper proposes a CSI correction localization algorithm using DenseNet, which is termed CorFi. This method first uses isolation forest to eliminate abnormal CSI, and then constructs a CSI amplitude fingerprint containing time, frequency and antenna pair information. In an offline stage, the densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) are trained to establish correspondence between CSI and spatial position, and generalized extended interpolation is applied to construct the interpolated fingerprint database. In an online stage, DenseNet is used for position estimation, and the interpolated fingerprint database and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) are combined to correct the position of the prediction results with low maximum probability. In an indoor corridor environment, the average localization error is 0.536m.

Existing cyber deception technologies (e.g., operating system obfuscation) can effectively disturb attackers' network reconnaissance and hide fingerprint information of valuable cyber assets (e.g., containers). However, they exhibit ineffectiveness against skilled attackers. In this study, a proactive fingerprint deception method is proposed, termed as Continuously Anonymizing Containers' Fingerprints (CACF), which modifies the container's fingerprint in the cloud resource pool to satisfy the anonymization standard. As demonstrated by experimental results, the CACF can effectively increase the difficulty for attackers.

In this paper, we clarify the importance of performance evaluation using a plurality of smartphones in a positioning system based on radio waves. Specifically, in a positioning system using bluetooth low energy, the positioning performance of two types of positioning algorithms is performed using a plurality of smartphones. As a result, we confirmed that the fingerprint algorithm does not always provide sufficient positioning performance. It depends on the model of the smartphone used. On the other hand, the hybrid algorithm that the authors have already proposed is robust in the difference of the received signal characteristics of the smartphone. Consequently, we spotlighted that the use of multiple devices is essential for providing high-quality location-based services in real environments in the performance evaluation of radio wave-based positioning systems using smartphones.

In this paper, we propose a WiFi-based indoor positioning system using a fingerprint method, whose database is constructed with estimated reference locations. The reference locations and their information, called data sets in this paper, are obtained by moving reference devices at a constant speed while gathering information of available access points (APs). In this approach, the reference locations can be estimated using the velocity without any precise reference location information. Therefore, the cost of database construction can be dramatically reduced. However, each data set includes some errors due to such as the fluctuation of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values, the device-specific WiFi sensitivities, the AP installations, and removals. In this paper, we propose a method to merge data sets to construct a consistent database suppressing such undesired effects. The proposed approach assumes that the intervals of reference locations in the database are constant and that the fingerprint for each reference location is calculated from multiple data sets. Through experimental results, we reveal that our approach can achieve an accuracy of 80%. We also show a detailed discussion on the results related parameters in the proposed approach.

Analyzing aging-induced delay degradations of ring oscillators (ROs) is an effective way to detect recycled field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). However, it requires a large number of RO measurements for all FPGAs before shipping, which increases the measurement costs. We propose a cost-efficient recycled FPGA detection method using a statistical performance characterization technique called virtual probe (VP) based on compressed sensing. The VP technique enables the accurate prediction of the spatial process variation of RO frequencies on a die by using a very small number of sample RO measurements. Using the predicted frequency variation as a supervisor, the machine-learning model classifies target FPGAs as either recycled or fresh. Through experiments conducted using 50 commercial FPGAs, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 90% cost reduction for RO measurements while preserving the detection accuracy. Furthermore, a one-class support vector machine algorithm was used to classify target FPGAs with around 94% detection accuracy.

This manuscript discusses a new indoor positioning method and proposes a multi-distance function trilateration over k-NN fingerprinting method using radio signals. Generally, the strength of radio signals, referred to received signal strength indicator or RSSI, decreases as they travel in space. Our method employs a list of fingerprints comprised of RSSIs to absorb interference between radio signals, which happens around the transmitters and it also employs multiple distance functions for conversion from distance between fingerprints to the physical distance in order to absorb the interference that happens around the receiver then it performs trilateration between the top three closest fingerprints to locate the receiver's current position. An experiment in positioning performance is conducted in our laboratory and the result shows that our method is viable for a position-level indoor positioning method and it could improve positioning performance by 12.7% of positioning error to 0.406 in meter in comparison with traditional methods.

Radio signals show small characteristic differences between radio transmitters resulted from their idiosyncratic hardware properties. Based on the parameters estimation of transmitter imperfections, a novel radiometric identification method is presented in this letter. The fingerprint features of the radio are extracted from the mismatches of the modulator and the nonlinearity of the power amplifier, and used to train a support vector machine classifier to identify the class label of a new data. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate the validation of this method.

In this research, we propose a novel method to determine fingerprint liveness to improve the discriminative behavior and classification accuracy of the combined features. This approach detects if a fingerprint is from a live or fake source. In this approach, fingerprint images are analyzed in the differential excitation (DE) component and the centralized binary pattern (CBP) component, which yield the DE image and CBP image, respectively. The images obtained are used to generate a two-dimensional histogram that is subsequently used as a feature vector. To decide if a fingerprint image is from a live or fake source, the feature vector is processed using support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method and compare it to existing approaches, we conducted experiments using the datasets from the 2011 and 2015 Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet), collected from four sensors. The results show that the proposed method gave comparable or even better results and further prove that methods derived from combination of features provide a better performance than existing methods.

Many users are exposed to threats of drive-by download attacks through the Web. Attackers compromise vulnerable websites discovered by search engines and redirect clients to malicious websites created with exploit kits. Security researchers and vendors have tried to prevent the attacks by detecting malicious data, i.e., malicious URLs, web content, and redirections. However, attackers conceal parts of malicious data with evasion techniques to circumvent detection systems. In this paper, we propose a system for detecting malicious websites without collecting all malicious data. Even if we cannot observe parts of malicious data, we can always observe compromised websites. Since vulnerable websites are discovered by search engines, compromised websites have similar traits. Therefore, we built a classifier by leveraging not only malicious but also compromised websites. More precisely, we convert all websites observed at the time of access into a redirection graph and classify it by integrating similarities between its subgraphs and redirection subgraphs shared across malicious, benign, and compromised websites. As a result of evaluating our system with crawling data of 455,860 websites, we found that the system achieved a 91.7% true positive rate for malicious websites containing exploit URLs at a low false positive rate of 0.1%. Moreover, it detected 143 more evasive malicious websites than the conventional content-based system.

Indoor fingerprint location based on WiFi in large-scale indoor parking lots is more and more widely employed for vehicle lookup. However, the challenge is to ensure the location functionality because of the particularity and complexities of the indoor parking lot environment. To reduce the need to deploy of reference points (RPs) and the offline sampling workload, a partition-fitting fingerprint algorithm (P-FP) is proposed. To improve the location accuracy of the target, the PS-FP algorithm, a sampling importance resampling (SIR) particle filter with threshold based on P-FP, is further proposed. Firstly, the entire indoor parking lot is partitioned and the environmental coefficients of each partitioned section are gained by using the polynomial fitting model. To improve the quality of the offline fingerprint database, an error characteristic matrix is established using the difference between the fitting values and the actual measured values. Thus, the virtual RPs are deployed and C-means clustering is utilized to reduce the amount of online computation. To decrease the fluctuation of location coordinates, the SIR particle filter with a threshold setting is adopted to optimize the location coordinates. Finally, the optimal threshold value is obtained by comparing the mean location error. Test results demonstrated that PS-FP could achieve high location accuracy with few RPs and the mean location error is only about 0.7m. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) show that, using PS-FP, 98% of location errors are within 2m. Compared with the weighted K-nearest neighbors (WKNN) algorithm, the location accuracy by PS-FP exhibit an 84% improvement.