Sweaty palms safeguarding security

Nathan Kahl — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:26:40 +0000

Sweaty palms safeguarding security Nathan Kahl Mon, 10/16/2023 - 15:26

Identity protection and, relatedly, the ability to confidently verify your identity when required, are increasingly important in a digital, connected world. The next-generation security solution may be right at your fingertips…but not in the way you might think.

Emanuela Marasco, an assistant professor at the ��AV Information Sciences and Technology Department and Center for Secure Information Systems, is working on an innovative way to verify human identity by using sweat samples collected from fingertips. According to Marasco, your sweat makes you unique. “There is evidence that sweat on the skin of the finger can discriminate between people,” she said. The key is to properly detect sweat metabolites—small molecules such as lipids or amino acids that result from metabolic processes in your body.

Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), her research uses hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to peer into sweat and look at three specific metabolites. HSI, which is widely used for agriculture, geosciences, and molecular biology, among other fields, can find and identify various materials invisible to the human eye and other technical viewing equipment.

Sweat from your fingers—not just your prints—can help verify your identity.

Marasco said, “Traditional approaches for spoofing are now in danger, because they cannot fool HSI.” According to a paper Marasco recently lead and co-authored, HSI creates a representation of an object by capturing the light bouncing off it, which can relate to its chemical make-up. Among the benefits of sweat analysis for identification is that it is rapid and noninvasive. In addition, according to the paper, it avoids the shortcomings of current systems, which are prone to spoofing (one thing disguised as another) and morphing (the alteration of travel-document photographs, for example), and which do not consistently work across different skin tones. The technology to get around traditional systems has come so far that “fake” fingerprints are so accurate they bypass authentication can be created with something as common as a 3D printer and something as simple as wood glue.

This grant was funded under the NSF EAGER program, which funds research in its early stages. According to NSF, EAGER projects fall under a category of “’high risk, high payoff’ in the sense that it involves radically transformative approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

Marasco said, “I see a wide range of applications. Regardless of this research into sweat, simply looking into the application of HSI to skin could yield numerous findings. There are transformative aspects to this; many studies can be enabled from this project.”

Practical applications are likely still many years away. But if you’re a nervous flier who gets anxious at the site of TSA checkpoints, just wait—those sweaty hands of yours perhaps won’t be a nuisance someday… in fact, they may end up helping you get quickly to your gate.

Learn More About Cybersecurity

In This Story

Emanuela Marasco

Mason researchers use DNA 'origami' to design novel vaccine platform

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 17:11:01 +0000

Mason researchers use DNA 'origami' to design novel vaccine platform Nathan Kahl Thu, 03/30/2023 - 13:11

In This Story

Remi Veneziano

Four ��AV researchers are part of a team developing a novel method to develop vaccines rapidly. Their new process takes advantage of DNA molecules’ self-assembly properties by folding them onto nanoparticles that mimic viruses, eliciting a robust protective immunity to COVID in mice. The journal Communications Biology published the findings in March.

Mason PhD student Esra Oktay and researcher Remi Veneziano working in the lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

Remi Veneziano, an assistant professor, and Esra Oktay, a PhD student, both in the Mason College of Engineering and Computing’s Department of Bioengineering, published the paper along with Farhang Alem and Aarthi Narayanan in the Mason College of Science, collaborators from the U.S Naval Research Lab, and Case Western Reserve University.

“The beauty of this technique is that the design flexibility and the ease of assembly allow users to create nanoparticles with prescribed geometry and size," Veneziano explains. "They are assembled by mixing multiple DNA strands in a tube and by slowly [heating and cooling] them.”

The team took advantage of having a DNA "barcode" of sorts on the surface of the particles to attach antigens precisely at prescribed locations. “All the positions in the structure have a different sequence. Here at position A, you have sequence ‘ATCG,’ for example,” he says, referencing DNA base-letter abbreviations. “At position B you might have ‘CGAT,’ which allows you to modify only specific regions of the nanostructure.”

Having control and predictability of the DNA structure, the team organized multiple antigens—small viral proteins that trigger an immune response—to be a virus copycat with specific application onto the DNA strand. This allowed for an efficient triggering of the immune system, compared to results seen when randomly organizing an antigen. Their results suggest that “we don’t need to pack a lot of antigen on the surface of a particle,” Veneziano says. “We just need to organize the antigen in a specific pattern so that it’s recognized more efficiently by the immune cell.”

Their approach was successfully tested in a mouse model at the Mason Regional Biocontainment Lab within the university’s Biomedical Research Laboratory, one of 12 regional biocontainment facilities funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Narayanan says, “The platform is extremely versatile and adaptable in the antigenic possibilities it can present. With the appetite to develop broadly effective vaccines against multiple viruses with pandemic potential, this approach holds major promise.”

Oktay, who is working on a doctoral degree in bioengineering, notes, “During the pandemic we wanted to establish a strategy against COVID-19. We created an innovative and controllable platform using a tour de force of DNA origami technology, which has achieved a significant outcome in the way of protection against viruses.” She says the future goal is “to adapt this platform for other types of viruses for which currently there is no vaccine, and to create a protective system.”

Veneziano indicates the ability to stave off future pandemics is encouraging. “This novel technology has the potential to change the way we currently design vaccine particles by making vaccine development faster, safer, and cheaper.”