Period: November, 2015 - October, 2019

In order to fight against identity theft the Secure Access Control Over Wide Area Network (SWAN) research project will provide authentication and secure access to banking and other services over broadband and
mobile networks by using biometric identifiers. The SWAN project is funded by The Research Council of Norway. The SWAN-project will research and develop innovative technologies and countermeasures to mitigate
presentation attacks (also coined as spoofing attacks), which lead to a usable, economic, and privacy-preserving access control platform based on biometrics.

The project has 6 partners from Norway, Germany, France and Switzerland and is truly an European research project. NTNU as the coordinator of the project, is working closely with its partners University of Oslo, Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, Safran Morpho and Zwipe.

The group assembles standing experience in identity and biometrics research and more particularly in mobile face and speaker recognition as well as in presentation attack detection (aka anti-spoofing). The team is supported by end users from the financial sector and the Association of German Banks. As password-based approach are vulnerable, and crime related to illegal access to different accounts is easier than ever the SWAN research will initially deal with banking transactions, but the goal is to extend the technology to other e-services such as e-health.

Biometric references will be stored, controlled and verified locally based on a pre-shared secret, which can be used to seal and authenticate transaction data. This overcomes the need of centralized storage of biometric data. Smartphones will act as hardware tokens to which the additional functionalities will be integrated to capture the biometric characteristics like (face, fingerprint, voice and eye).  Focus of the research project will be biometric authentication to preserve privacy and adapt existing and emerging standards in the field.

• NTNU (Coordinator of the project)
• University of Oslo
• Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland
• Safran Morpho
• Zwipe
• The Association of German Banks