IT Leadership, Architecture & Engineering. Cloud, AI, Data, Cybersecurity

The ability to guarantee the integrity of a document and the authentication of the sender has been highly desirable since the beginning of human civilization. Even today, we are constantly challenged for authentication in the form of picture identification, personal hand signature and finger prints. Organizations need to ensure authentication of the individual and other corporations before they conduct business transactions with them. When human contact is not possible, the challenge of authentication and consequently authorization increases. Encryption technologies, especially public-key cryptography provide a reliable way to digitally sign documents. In today’s digital economies and global networks digital signatures play a vital role in information security.

While digital signatures and encryption are old technologies, their importance is renewed with the rapid growth of the Internet. Online business transactions have been growing at a rapid pace. More and more money transactions occur electronically and over the Internet. Non-repudiation is important when personal contact is not possible. Digital signatures serve that purpose. Encryption ensures that information sent for the intended party can only be read, unaltered by that party. Several technologies support encryption. The enterprise security model consists of domains that get protection from resources not permitted to access or execute functions. There is a clear distinction between authorizing a resource and authenticating a resource. When a person shows a driver’s license at the bar before he gets a drink, the bar tender will look at it and compare his photograph with the actual person presenting it. This is authentication. When he checks the date of birth for legal drinking age, ...

Dynamic signature verification (DSV) is the process by which an individual’s signature is authenticated against a known signature pattern. Dynamics of the process of creating a signature is initially enrolled into the authenticating system, which is then used to compare the future signature patterns. Several factors including speed, pressure, acceleration, velocity and size ratios are taken into account. These measurements are then digitized and stored for comparison later. Signatures have long been used to authenticate documents in the real world, before the technology wave, signatures, seals and tamper-proof envelopes were used for secure and valid message exchange. With the onset of technology and digital document interchange, a growing need for authenticating digital documents has emerged. Digital signatures had emerged in the 1970s as a means of developing a cipher of fixed length from an input of theoretically unlimited length. The signature is expected to be collision free ...

I was unpleasantly surprised to see longer than usual lines at the international port of entry at O’Hare this February. My flight connected me to O’Hare International at Chicago from Schiphol Airport at Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was a long flight and it wasn’t apparent to me the reason for the delay in processing passengers. A huge line of people with hand luggage zigzagged what appeared to be a large hall, the end of the line fading in the distance. I was tired and wanted to get to my apartment and I did not believe I would ever get there at this rate. In a 2004 article published on New Scientist, Will Knight reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiated the installation of a fingerprinting system. A total of 115 airports have the biometric security equipment installed (Knight, 2004).A DHS officer made the comment to Knight that “it takes each finger scan takes just three seconds and pilot schemes produced just one error in every thousand checks” (Knight, 2004). ...

I wrote up some views on Service Oriented Architecture in 2004. This was a time when XML was a buzzword and people were wondering and writing about SOA. I was implementing a leading edge solution for a policy administration system using an ACORD XML interface and hosting Internet B2B services for independent agencies. A soup to nuts solution that included XML, SOAP, WSDL, Java EE, EJB and RDBMS + COTS. I also wrote this unpublished paper: Introduction This is the most important decade for distributed computing. Reuse and interoperability are back in a big way for distributed applications. Over the years, several types of reuse methodologies have been proposed and implemented with little success: procedure reuse, object reuse, component reuse, design reuse etc. None of the methodologies tackled interoperable reuse. Enter web-services. Web-services are big and everyone in the industry is taking this seriously. Web services are reusable services based on industry-wide standards. This i...

I wrote this in 2004 when I purchased a car with Voice Activated controls. It was amazing back then. Speech Recognition in Automobiles I am alone in my car cruising from Carmel, Indiana to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana for a weekend class. It’s early in the morning and I wonder if I will make it to class on time. After about ten minutes on interstate 65, I ask impatiently “How long to the destination?” Honda’s advanced navigation system gears into action; it promptly queries the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and local GPS repeaters for the vehicle’s current co-ordinates. It then averages out the expected speed based on current averages on the interstate, state roads and inner streets and responds back in a pleasant natural female voice “It is about forty two minutes to the destination”. I am definitely going to be late for class. Speech recognition technology, once a domain of fantastic science fiction, is a reality today. This technology has begun to to...