Edlira Martiri, has defended her PhD entitled “Honey Templates: a Protection Mechanism for Biometric Systems” on Friday, 14 January, 2022. Her work is carried out at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology. Here is a summary:

The thesis presents an independent research work, a new mechanism that augments a biometric system with synthetic (honey) templates and that enables the detectability of a possible template database leakage. In this research it resulted that biometric honey templates should be designed in such a way that a possible attacker can not distinguish them from real ones, and, on the other side, these templates should be different enough not to be considered as acceptable by a verification module. Not only the research provided the soundness of this newly presented technique, but it also included new biometric protection functions, a hybrid scheme, two-level security analysis, and mainly a new concept on synthetic templates generation, on how to make the system learn from the process (an iterative classifier, a tool that by means of Machine Learning tools is continuously learning and generating improved honey templates in terms of indistinguishability). We can truthfully say this work presents an interdisciplinary attempt in the long scientific endeavour which hopefully improves the security of biometric systems and contributes to other topics within information security too.

Assessment committee:

1st opponent: Professor Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA.

2nd opponent: Senior Researcher Svetlana Boudko, Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo, Norway.

Internal member: Professor Patrick Bours, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, NTNU, Gjøvik, Norway.

Edlira Martiri’s main supervisor has been Assoc. Prof. Bian Yang, IIK, NTNU, co-supervisor Professor Christoph Busch, IIK, NTNU.

Congratulations!!!