Public Funding for Validsoft UK Limited

The BioSpeak project aims to create robust and scalable tools for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, able to process thousands of channels in parallel using state of the art algorithms. These tools will allow multilingual interoperability and they will be designed to work on security and telephony focused environments. The number of financial transactions made by telephone is increasing and the industry needs better tools to authenticate end users. IVR systems are crucial to modern society and an essential tool for organisations that want to provide more services by telephone, but not sacrificing end user security. The security of online transactions is vital in the "connected" society, but the security of the voice channel is actually very weak and undermined by many different factors. Existing alternatives are not only technically inferior from a user experience point of view but they also have prohibitive licensing costs from non European sources. BioSpeak will stimulate European product innovation and development to provide competitive advantage derived from world leading research, improving licensing opportunities for this technology worldwide This project will develop biometric tools based on ALIZE, an open source library designed for research and experimentation of signal processing algorithms and statistics used on biometric authentication. Although very complete, ALIZE is not ready to be used in a large scale commercial application with real time and multiple audio channels processing needs. Validsoft, the main project partner, will integrate these tools with ValidSoft VALid® which is a commercial product that provides a multi-factor authentication solution targeted at online security. Validsoft VALid® protects against these threats by the use of a second factor and is heavy focussed on telephony. The use of a third factor (a biometric based on the user voiceprint) will enable ValidSoft to enter new markets segments and gain market share in existing markets, bringing a competitive edge to Validsoft as a leading provider of this technology, strengthening their presence on the security market. Validsoft Ireland is the integration and test arm of Validsoft. It maintains the test models, supports the core infrastructure and performs functional and non-functional testing for ValidSoft products. ValidSoft Ireland also managed the VALId VPN and Self Certification solutions. ValidSoft is also to research fusion and decision making strategies in the context of speech dialogues, focussing on speaker recognition from a range of inputs including conventional speaker biometrics, speech recognition in various forms, speech quantity and speech content generally. These activities will be partly subcontracted to the University of Swansea within the framework of a studentship funded by Validsoft (ruled by a separate bilateral agreement). The joint research degrees between the University of Swansea and LIA Avignon will contribute to strenghten the link with the partnership of Biospeak. Acapela Group will work on the adaptation of their Text-to-Speech System to be used on security applications. Acapela will research how to approximate synthesized voices to pre-recorded ones, aiming to reduce the time between new voice recordings are introduced on the system, but keeping user familiarity with the voices they already know, extending the variability of texts used to authenticate end users. LIA Avignon fulfill two roles within the programme, namely 1) the integration of new software components coming from the Partners into the existing ALIZE libraries, particularly those relating to real-time operation, and 2) research activities linked to real-time speech-based biometrics and related security aspects, in cooperation with the University of Swansea. The biometric tools will be integrated with Calistel’s automatic IVR computers. These computers are frequently used on fault-tolerant environments and under very high load (over 10000 simultaneous calls) with reliability levels over 99,999%. The main objective is to demonstrate that ALIZE can be used independently from voice and telephony architectures. Calistel will integrate the security features of Real Time ALIZE into their actual software solutions. Multitel will provide his software engineering know how from the development of multiplatform speech recognition toolkits in the enhancements of ALIZE. Multitel will be responsible for the development of test suites able to validate the enhancements on already existing code and to quality check new code developed during the project. This effort will be crucial to extend the actual functionalities of ALIZE, as it is required for any software re-engineering effort.

Our critical national infrastructure is increasingly dependent on information systems and the services they support. Cloud computing ecosystems of service providers and consumers including individuals, public bodies, SMEs, large enterprises, and governments will become a significant part of the way these services are provided, allowing more agile coalitions, cost savings and improved service delivery. Existing approaches to information security do not easily extend to this multiparty world and a step change in security attitudes and information stewardship will be essential. In the cloud, it will be harder to establish the risks and obligations and to determine appropriate responses. The aim is to establish new approaches to managing risk for all the ecosystem participants, regulators and policy makers. We will build on and extend the work on mathematical and economic models developed as part of the TSB funded ‘Trust Economics’ project. Specifically, providing a modelling framework for exploring responsibilities, threats, defences, and incentives of the cloud stakeholders that will be used to provide tools for the prediction, communication and mitigation of risk to decision-makers.