Shaheen N Abdul Jabbar

The technique that uses both contextual and historical user information along with data supplied during an internet transaction to assess the probability of whether a user interaction is authentic or not is called risk based authentication.

Traditional username and password along with information such as who the user is, from where the user is logging in (IP address and information of the location from where the user is actually in at the time of transaction), velocity of the transaction (the process of verifying if its possible for a person who recently logged in from location 1 could login from location 2) and the type of device the user is using are considered as contextual information.

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Passwords and personal identification numbers (PIN) are information that we need to remember since the day we started interacting with digital systems. Do we know the count of passwords we need to remember? Do we know if we forgot a password already? Some of these passwords also known as passphrase are long to remember that we need to come up with a pattern to create such passwords. We sometimes rely on tools such as a sticky, PDA or text file to store these lists of passwords.

Would it be easy to identify yourself as if you are been seen by another individual acknowledging their acquaintance with you? That’s exactly what a biometric authentication technology does. It uses a physical or psychological trait that the individual always has with him or her for identification and/or authentication.

In this system, the physical or psychological trait of an individual is measured, recorded and quantified to obtain a biometric enrollment. The system can be sure to a degree of certainty that a person is who he/she claims to be based on this initial enrollment. A template, which is a long string of alphanumeric characters that describes the characteristics or features of the person, is created at each enrollment based on a biometric algorithm. The algorithm that translates physical traits to a digital representation is called the biometric algorithm. The algorithm also allows matching of a newly created template (live template) with that of the initially created one. If the matching is not closed enough, the person will not be verified.

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An online search shows majority of tools available for wiping out data on a disk points to a practice of 7 wipes. They believe that it is a US DoD requirement. Some of them support the Gutmann method of 35 wipes.

However, I could not find any documentation on US government website that indicates seven wipes. The US DoD 5220.22-M, “National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual that most online tools refers to does not have any requirements of number of wipe passes. However, I found a wiki page on Data Remanence that has enough citation and it contains the following -

“As of November 2007, the United States Department of Defense considers overwriting acceptable for clearing magnetic media within the same security area/zone, but not as a sanitization method. Only degaussing  or physical destruction is acceptable for the latter.[4]

On the other hand, according to the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 (p. 7): “Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared by one overwrite” and “for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged.”[1] An analysis by Wright et al. of recovery techniques, including magnetic force microscopy, also concludes that a single wipe is all that is required for modern drives. They point out that the long time required for multiple wipes “has created a situation where many organisations ignore the issue all together – resulting in data leaks and loss. “[5] ” Read the rest of this entry »