IFS-TC organizes 3rd Workshop on Information Forensics and Security in Brazil

The Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee of the Signal Processing Society recently organized the 2011 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security in picturesque Foz do Iguacu, Brazil, from November 29th to December 2nd, 2011.

Third in the series (after WIFS'09 in London, and WIFS'10 in Seattle), this year's workshop again attracted a record number of submissions. The main track received an overwhelming 123 submissions, out of which 40 high-quality papers were selected after rigorous peer review. For the first time at WIFS, there was a "Work in Progress" session, in which counted with 8 researchers presented ongoing work in an interactive poster presentation. Also making a first-time appearance this year were 12 presentations in the "ICMedia Challenges" sessions created in close collaboration with the Brazilian Association of Federal Police Forensic Experts and the Brazilian Federal Police.

A total of 116 people attended the workshop, setting a new attendance record as well. The first day was dedicated to four free tutorials on Multimedia Forensics, by Nasir Memon of NYU Poly; Information Security from a Hardware Perspective: Challenges and Solutions, by Debdeep Mukhopadhyay and Rajat Subhra Chakraborty of IIT Kharagpur; Social Science and its Impact on Cyber Security, by Deanna Dace Caputo of Mitre Corporation; and 3-D Reconstruction tools and techniques for Forensics and Surveillance, by Eugene Liscio of AI2-3D.

The regular program of the conference was conducted over three days, and included new research results in biometrics, computer and network security/forensics, multimedia security/forensics, signal processing for forensics, and theoretical foundations for forensics. Each day also featured a keynote speech by experts in the areas covered by the IFS-TC, including "Iris Recognition: Challenges, Advances, and Generalizations", by Patrick Flynn of Notre Dame, followed by "Cloud Security: What's New?" by William Horne of HP Labs, and "Watermarking: Quo Vadis?", by Ton Kalker of Huawei.

The three Challenges sessions, presented by forensics experts from the Brazilian Federal police, were intended to provide researchers with a strong feel for some of the needs and current challenges of the professional forensics and security community. These presentations covered case studies and technical open issues which are perceived as especially relevant for the solution of real life criminal cases. It was a great opportunity for both experts and researchers to exchange experiences and make professional contacts. It is hoped that these sessions, which were heavily attended and generated a lot of audience questions, will lead to greater collaboration between the IFS-TC community and forensic experts working directly in the prevention and solution of crimes and to greater visibility and application of state-of-the-art research results.

The Technical Committee also presented four best student paper awards. The winners of the two gold awards (which included a certificate and a US$2,000 travel grant) were Aseem Othman, for a paper titled "Mixing Fingerprints For Generating Virtual Identities", and Juan Elices for a paper titled "Fingerprinting Tor's Hidden Service Log Files Using a Timing Channel". The two silver awards included a certificate and a US$1,000 travel grant, and were given to Li Sheng for the paper "Attack using reconstructed fingerprint" and to Jeffrey Paone for the paper "On the Consistency of the Biometric Menagerie for Irises and Iris Matchers".

The next edition of WIFS is already scheduled for Tenerife, Spain, December 2-5, 2012. The paper submission deadline is June 24th, 2012. More information is available at the WIFS 2012 Conference Website: www.wifs12.org.

- [This article was contributed by Dinei Florencio]