IT Management Report: Biometrics, PETs, and WSN Security

This IT Management report delves into three key areas: biometric access control systems, Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), and threats to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It begins by explaining biometric systems like palm print, face recognition, and gait recognition, discussing their advantages and disadvantages. The report then explores PETs, including encryption, metadata and digital rights management, and application programming, emphasizing their role in protecting data privacy. Finally, the report analyzes various threats and vulnerabilities faced by WSNs, such as Denial of Service attacks, Sybil attacks, and node capturing, and suggests mitigation strategies, including intrusion detection systems to secure the networks. The report provides a comprehensive overview of IT management practices and security considerations.

Running head: IT MANAGEMENT
IT Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Part 1....................................................................................................................................2
Answer 1..........................................................................................................................2
Answer 2..........................................................................................................................3
Answer 3..........................................................................................................................4
References............................................................................................................................6

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Part 1
Answer 1
Biometric access control systems are specialized devices that allow only the authorized
users of a system or an organization in gaining access to the restricted areas. The working
principle of a biometric sensor is that it changes a biometric trait of a person to an electrical
signal. The biometric devices consist of a sensor that includes a high definition camera and facial
recognition or a voice capture. Broadly dividing, there are two types of biometric system,
physiological and behavioral biometric system (Banerjee & Woodard, 2012). The physiological
biometric system includes face recognition, fingerprint recognition, palm print recognition, iris
recognition, gait recognition and so on. The advantages and disadvantages of palm, face and gait
recognition are as follows-
Palm Print
One of the major advantages of palm print is that, since the palm area is larger and
therefore, more distinctive feature can be captured in comparison to the fingerprint recognition.
This makes the recognition process even more accurate (Cappelli, Ferrara & Maio, 2012).
The disadvantage is that, due to the need of a larger surface area, palm print scanner
becomes larger in size, which in turn increases the cost of the system.
Face Recognition
The major advantage of face recognition technique is that it is user friendly and an
inexpensive technique of biometric identification.

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The major problem or disadvantage of facial recognition is that even the relative angle of
the user’s face has a profound effect in the recognition score (Beveridge et al., 2013).
Gait recognition
The major advantage of gait recognition is that it requires no physical contact, much
similar to face recognition.
The disadvantage of gait recognition is that, certain internal and external factors such as
aging weight gain, weather conditions and so on can affect the recognition process.
Answer 2
Privacy Enhancing Technology or PET increases the protection of the information
privacy by ensuring prevention of unwanted processing of personal and confidential information
(De Cristofaro & Wright, 2013). There are different types of PETs that can be effectively used
on the internet in order to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the data. The three different
PET, encryption, metadata and digital rights management and application programming are
discussed below-
Encryption
Encryption is a widely used technique for protection of information privacy over the
internet. It supports the security as well as proportionality principal of data protection law (John
Justin & Manimurugan, 2012). Encryption is very simple to implement and therefore it is a
highly effective PET tool. Use of different encryption algorithms such as DES is an example of
PET.
Metadata and Digital Rights Management

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This is a new technology in comparison to encryption. This PET provides a framework
that describes the semantics of data that can be stored over internet (Foulonneau & Riley, 2014).
It is therefore very useful for gaining compliance with the data protection legislation as it helps
in differentiating between data and personal data. Use of different cryptographic algorithms in
data protection over internet is an example of this PET.
Application Programming
According to this PET, the software packages or applications that process personal data
has to follow some rules of data processing that upholds the privacy protection regulatory
requirements. This ensures that the privacy of the users is not breached while using an
application over the internet.
Answer 3
Threats and Vulnerabilities
The different types of threat and vulnerabilities that can be used to attack the Wireless
sensor networks are as follows-
1. Denial of Service Attack: The main aim of denial of service attack is to exhaust the
resources available in a victim node by sending unnecessary extra packets, preventing the
legitimate users from accessing the resources that they are entitled to (Yu, 2014).
2. Sybil Attack: This attack in Wireless sensor network targets the multiple routing
features with an aim of degrading the integrity of data security and resource utilization.
3. Wormhole Attack: It is one of the most common attacks in wireless sensor network
and occurs in the initial phase of setting up of the connection. The attacker records the packets at

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one location of the network and tunnels it to other locations, which may include malicious nodes
forwarding data between the two legitimate nodes.
4. Node capturing: Attackers might capture and gain access to the nodes revealing its
information. Since it captures and compromises the whole sensor network, it prevents all
communication from that node.
5. Energy Drain Attack: Attackers use a compromised node in injecting the fabricated
reports into the network that can cause false alarm and waste the real world response efforts,
draining the finite amount of energy.
Threat Mitigation
Establishment of proper intrusion detection system in the network can mitigate the threats
in the wireless sensor networks. The entry of foreign particles in the network should be
prevented in order to eliminate the risk of attacks in WSN (Khan, et al., 2013).

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References
Banerjee, S. P., & Woodard, D. L. (2012). Biometric authentication and identification using
keystroke dynamics: A survey. Journal of Pattern Recognition Research, 7(1), 116-139.
Beveridge, J. R., Phillips, P. J., Bolme, D. S., Draper, B. A., Givens, G. H., Lui, Y. M., ... &
Flynn, P. J. (2013, September). The challenge of face recognition from digital point-and-
shoot cameras. In Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS), 2013 IEEE
Sixth International Conference on (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Cappelli, R., Ferrara, M., & Maio, D. (2012). A fast and accurate palmprint recognition system
based on minutiae. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B
(Cybernetics), 42(3), 956-962.
De Cristofaro, E., & Wright, M. (2013). Privacy enhancing technologies. In Proceedings of 13th
International Symposium, PETS.
Foulonneau, M., & Riley, J. (2014). Metadata for digital resources: implementation, systems
design and interoperability. Elsevier.
John Justin, M., & Manimurugan, S. (2012). A survey on various encryption
techniques. International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering (IJSCE)
ISSN, 2231, 2307.
Khan, W. Z., Aalsalem, M. Y., Saad, M. N. B. M., & Xiang, Y. (2013). Detection and mitigation
of node replication attacks in wireless sensor networks: a survey. International Journal of
Distributed Sensor Networks, 9(5), 149023.

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Yu, S. (2014). Distributed Denial of Service Attack and Defense (pp. 15-29). Springer New
York.