Abstract
M.Sc. (Computer Science)
A video conference is an interactive meeting between two or more locations, facilitated by simultaneous two-way video and audio transmissions. People in a video conference, also known as participants, join these video conferences for business and recreational purposes. In a typical video conference, we should properly identify and authenticate every participant in the video conference, if information discussed during the video conference is confidential. This prevents unauthorized and unwanted people from being part of the conference and exposing any confidential information during the video conference.
Present existing video conferencing systems however, have problems in this area, resulting in some risks. These risks relate precisely to the lack of facilities to properly identify and authenticate participants, making it possible for unwanted/unauthorised participants to join the conference or masquerade as another participant. It is especially a problem, when facilitators or organisers are the only participants that know the authorised participants, or participants allowed in a video conference.
In this dissertation, we review the risks that are present in video conferencing, and create a security system, (called BioVid) that mitigates the identification and authentication risks in video conferences. BioVid uses a Speeded-Up Robust Features or SURF-based face recognition approach, to identify and authenticate any participant in a video conference. BioVid continuously monitors the participants to check if masquerading has occurred and when it does detect an unauthorised participant, it informs the Service Provider. The Service Provider can then deal with the problem by either kicking the participant or asking the other participants to vote the unauthorised participant out of the video conference.