Pictures taken from here.
Identity Theft Protection
Providing secure and efficient solutions for digital Identity Management (IdM) in a federation is of great significance in todays world. Fighting fraud like identity theft is especially a major concern. In a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ( report ) it was given that there have been 27.3 million cases of identity theft in the last five years, with roughly half of those occurring in 2004 itself. Overall, identity theft cost U.S. citizens $52.6 billion in 2004 . We need technical, social engineering and legal solutions for the prevention of such crime. Within the technical solutions itself we can explore a variety of techniques like cryptographic solutions, authentication protocols, database security and many others.
Collaborative Initiatives
The research being undertaken as part of this project is of high interest to various students, researchers and groups at Purdue and by industry. The project webpage is located here.
In order to maximize the potential impact, the following collaborations are been undertaken:
- Liberty Alliance Identity Theft Protection Special Interest Group: I participated in an Identity Theft Workshop (held on July 20, 2005 in Chicago), organized by the Liberty Alliance Initiative. The Liberty Alliance includes over 150 organizations from across the globe ranging from educational institutions and government organizations, to service providers and financial institutions, to technology firms and wireless providers. I followed up after the meeting and now CERIAS (and Purdue) is an affiliate member of Liberty Alliance. I am actively participating in the several identity theft prevention initiatives of this energetic group.
- Biometrics Group: A collaboration has started with the group lead by Prof. Stephen Elliot (College of Technology at Purdue) in the area of biometrics. The goal of the collaboration is to integrate biometrics techniques with our digital identity management techniques.
- Grid Computing Group: A collaboration has started with the group from ITaP involved in the security for the TeraGrid project. The main goal of this collaboration is to determine relevant requirements concerning federated digital identity management in the area of grid computing systems. Such requirements will inform our research. The collaboration will also allow us to prepare joint proposals with ITaP dealing with security for grid computing systems and digital identity management solutions specific to federations consisting of academic institutions.
Selected Talks
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Digital Identity Management in Information Secuity Class, CS526, Purdue, November 1, 2005. (Acknowledgement for certain slides: Liberty Alliance Identity Theft Prevention Group, Hellmuth Broda (Sun Microsystem), Paul John Biciunas (Fidelity Investments), Shibboleth Group. [Slides]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Identity Theft Protection in Information Secuity Class, CS526, Purdue, November 3, 2005. (Acknowledgement for certain slides: Liberty Alliance Identity Theft Prevention Group, Hellmuth Broda (Sun Microsystem), Paul John Biciunas (Fidelity Investments), Shibboleth Group. [Slides]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Establishing and Protecting Digital Identity in Federation Systems in ACM CCS2005 Workshop on Digital Identity Management November 11, 2005, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA. [Slides]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Digital Identity Management and Theft Protection in CERIAS Security Seminar, Purdue, February 6, 2006. (Acknowledgement for certain slides: Kim Cameron identityblog website, Liberty Alliance Identity Theft Prevention Group, Hellmuth Broda (Sun Microsystem)). [Slides], [Video]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Digital Identity Theft Protection in InWIC (Indiana Women in Computing) lightning talk, February 4th, 2006. [Slides]
- Anna C. Squicciarini on Digital Identity Management in Texas University, February 20th, 2006.
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Digital Identity Theft Protection in The Seventh Annual CERIAS Information Security Symposium,"Negotiating Trust", March 22nd, 2006. [Slides]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Privacy Preserving Biometric Authentication in Second ACM Workshop on Digital Identity Management (Alexandria, Virginia, USA, November 03 - 03, 2006). [Slides will be provided on request as it is a big file]
- Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel on Aggregate Zero knowledge Proofs in the CERIAS-R group meeting. This talk is similar to the talk by Dr. Rui Xue for the Midwest Security Symposium in 2006. [Slides]