• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.115-124
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• 2011

There has been significant research in security technology such as e-passport standards, as e-passports have been introduced internationally. E-passports combine the latest security technologies such as smart card, public key infrastructure, and biometric recognition, so that these technologies can prevent unauthorized copies and counterfeits. Biometric information stored in e-passports is the most sensitive personal information, and it is expected to bring the highest risk of damages in case of its forgery or duplication. The present e-passport standards cannot handle security features that verify whether its biometric information is copied or not. In this paper, we propose an e-passport security technology in which biometric watermarking is used to prevent the copy of biometric information in the e-passport. The proposed method, biometric watermarking, embeds the invisible date of acquisition into the original data during the e-passport issuing process so that the human visual system cannot perceive its invisibly watermarked information. Then the biometric sample, having its unauthorized copy, is retrieved at the moment of reading the e-passport from the issuing database. The previous e-passport security technology placed an emphasis on both access control readers and anti-cloning chip features, and it is expected that the proposed feature, copy protection of biometric information, will be demanded as the cases of biometric recognition to verify personal identity information has increased.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.40-46
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• 2006

Galactose joined to glucose by a $\beta(1\rightarrow4)$ glycosidic bond makes lactose and this disaccharide is rich in milk. It is known that lacotse is hydrolyzed to each monomeric sugar by either lactase in human or $\beta-galactosidase$ in bacteria. Ingestion of milk by lactase-deficient persons causes a temporary diarrhea and subsequent chronic diarrhea results in colitis with chronic inflammation. We isolated a $\beta-galactosidase$ producing psycrotolerant strain AS-20 from near cattle shed and investigated the growth at various temperature conditions. Whereas Escherichia coli strains did not grow at $10^{\circ}C$, the AS-20 strain could grow well at this low temperature and showed optimal growth at $30^{\circ}C$. The isolated strain was identified as 97% Hafnia alvei by biochemical properties. This strain could ferment glucose, lacotse, maltose, mannitol, xylose, ONPG, rhamanose and L-arabinose, and decarboxylate lysin and ornithine. To confirm the identity of isolated strain we amplified 16S rDNA by PCR and searched similarity of the 1426 bp DNA sequcence with Genbank database. The strain AS-20 showed 99% similarity with Hafnia alvei. The activity of $\beta-galactosidase$ was 1.5 times higher when the cell was grown at 10 or $20^{\circ}C$ than at $30^{\circ}C$. The highest enzyme activity of AS-20 was also much higher than that of E. coli, which was grown at $30^{\circ}C$.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2003

In the modern electronic world, the authentication of a person is an important task in many areas of online-transactions. Using biometrics to authenticate a person's identity has several advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers(PINs) and passwords. To gain maximum security in the verification system using biometrics, the computation of the verification as well as the store of the biometric pattern has to be taken place in the security token(smart card, USB token). However, there is an open issue of integrating biometrics into the security token because of its limited resources(memory space, processing power). In this paper, we describe our implementation of the USB security token system having 206MHz StrongARM CPU, 16MBytes flash memory, and 1MBytes RAM. Also, we evaluate the performance of a light-weighted In-gerprint verification algorithm that can be executed in the restricted environments. Based on experimental results, we confirmed that the RAM requirement of the proposed algorithm was about 6.8 KBytes and the Equal Error Rate(EER) was 1.7%.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.109-153
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• 1992

This paper estimates a translog cost function for the Korea's banking industry and derives various implications on the prospect for the Korean banking structure in the future based on the estimated efficiency indicators for the banking sector. The Korean banking industry is permitted to operate trust business to the full extent and the security business to a limited extent, while it is formally subjected to the strict, specialized banking system. Security underwriting and investment businesses are allowed in a very limited extent only for stocks and bonds of maturity longer than three year and only up to 100 percent of the bank paid-in capital. Until the end of 1991, the ceiling was only up to 25 percent of the total balance of the demand deposits. However, they are prohibited from the security brokerage business. While the in-house integration of security businesses with the traditional business of deposit and commercial lending is restrictively regulated as such, Korean banks can enter the security business by establishing subsidiaries in the industry. This paper, therefore, estimates the efficiency indicators as well as the cost functions, identifying the in-house integrated trust business and security investment business as important banking activities, for various cases where both the production and the intermediation function approaches in modelling the financial intermediaries are separately applied, and the banking businesses of deposit, lending and security investment as one group and the trust businesses as another group are separately and integrally analyzed. The estimation results of the efficiency indicators for various cases are summarized in Table 1 and Table 2. First, security businesses exhibit economies of scale but also economies of scope with traditional banking activities, which implies that in-house integration of the banking and security businesses may not be a nonoptimal banking structure. Therefore, this result further implies that the transformation of Korea's banking system from the current, specialized system to the universal banking system will not impede the improvement of the banking industry's efficiency. Second, the lending businesses turn out to be subjected to diseconomies of scale, while exhibiting unclear evidence for economies of scope. In sum, it implies potential efficiency gain of the continued in-house integration of the lending activity. Third, the continued integration of the trust businesses seems to contribute to improving the efficiency of the banking businesses, since the trust businesses exhibit economies of scope. Fourth, deposit services and fee-based activities, such as foreign exchange and credit card businesses, exhibit economies of scale but constant returns to scope, which implies, the possibility of separating those businesses from other banking and trust activities. The recent trend of the credit card business being operated separately from other banking activities by an independent identity in Korea as well as in the global banking market seems to be consistent with this finding. Then, how can the possibility of separating deposit services from the remaining activities be interpreted? If one insists a strict definition of commercial banking that is confined to deposit and commercial lending activities, separating the deposit service will suggest a resolution or a disappearance of banking, itself. Recently, however, there has been a suggestion that separating banks' deposit and lending activities by allowing a depository institution which specialize in deposit taking and investing deposit fund only in the safest securities such as government securities to administer the deposit activity will alleviate the risk of a bank run. This method, in turn, will help improve the safety of the payment system (Robert E. Litan, What should Banks Do? Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institution, 1987). In this context, the possibility of separating the deposit activity will imply that a new type of depository institution will arise naturally without contradicting the efficiency of the banking businesses, as the size of the banking market grows in the future. Moreover, it is also interesting to see additional evidences confirming this statement that deposit taking and security business are cost complementarity but deposit taking and lending businesses are cost substitute (see Table 2 for cost complementarity relationship in Korea's banking industry). Finally, it has been observed that the Korea's banking industry is lacking in the characteristics of natural monopoly. Therefore, it may not be optimal to encourage the merger and acquisition in the banking industry only for the purpose of improving the efficiency.