Dr. Feng Hao Computing Service University of Cambridge Tel: +44 1223 748439 Email: feng.hao AT cl.cam.ac.uk

I am currently doing post-doc research on a collaboration project between UCL and Cambridge; it is on developing user-friendly security solutions for grid computing. I obtained the PhD degree in 2007 under the supervision of Prof Ross Anderson and John Daugman. Here is my badge ID for CTU.

About me

"Feng" is my first name. I was born in Baoying County, China. It's a small town in Yangzhou city and well known as the "County of Rice and Fish". It abounds in agriculture and aquaculture, e.g. lotus, crab, shrimp ... Look at this, you will know what I mean. I studied B.Eng in EEE, NTU. I graduated half a year earlier than the normal course with the 1st Class Honor degree. I obtained my M.Eng there too.

Here is the PhD dissertation that I managed to complete within the official timeline of nine terms.

Publications

• F. Hao, et. al. "Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling", accepted by the 16th Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge, April 2008.
  • It proposes a crypto protocol called Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling (J-PAKE). The essence of design inherits from my earlier work (with Piotr Zielinski) on solving the Dining Cryptographers problem. Compared with EKE (patented by Lucent Technologies) and SPEKE (patented by Phoenix Technologies), J-PAKE has clear advantages in security with comparable efficiency.
  
  
• F. Hao, J. Daugman, P. Zielinski, "A fast search algorithm for a large fuzzy database," to be published on IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, June 2008. [Preprint]
  • It proposes an efficient search algorithm for iris recognition, which achieves a substantial speed-up over exhaustive search with a negligible loss of precision.
  
  
• F. Hao, "Kish's key exchange scheme is insecure," IEE Information Security, Vol. 153, No. 4, pp. 141--142, December 2006. [Paper]
  • It points out that a "totally secure" communication system, featured in Science, is seriously flawed.
  
  
• F. Hao, P. Zielinski, "The power of anonymous veto in public discussion," submitted.
  • It's a journal version of the below paper.
  
  
• F. Hao, P. Zielinski, "A 2-round anonymous veto protocol," 14th International Workshop on Security Protocols, Cambridge (2006)[Paper] [Slides]
  • It proposes an efficient solution to the Dining Cryptographers problem (Chaum, 1988), achieving the best efficiency among all available solutions.
  
  
• F. Hao, R. Anderson, J. Daugman, "Combining crypto with biometrics effectively," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 55, No. 9, pp. 1081--1088, Sept., 2006. [IEEE] [report]
  • It proposes the first practical and secure way to integrate the iris biometric into cryptographic applications.
  
  
• F. Hao, "Combining crypto with biometrics: a new human-security interface," [Transcript of discussion] 13th International Workshop on Security Protocols, LNCS 4631, pp. 133-138, 2005.
  • It presents a transcript of discussion on combining crypto with biometrics.
  
  
• F. Hao, C.W. Chan, "Online signature verification using a new extreme points warping technique," Pattern Recognition Letters,  Vol 24, Issue 16, 2943-2951 (2003) [Paper]
• It modifies the classic Dynamic Programming algorithm to better suit the requirements of handwritten signature verification.


• F. Hao, C.W. Chan, "Private Key Generation from On-line Handwritten Signatures," Information Management & Computer Security, Vol 10, Issue 4, 159-164 (2002) [Paper]
• It proposes to apply quantization to derive stable bits from handwritten signatures.


• F. Hao, C.W. Chan, "A Novel Usage of On-line Handwritten Signatures," Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communication System, Computer and Circuit, CSCC July 2002, Crete [paper]
• A preliminary conference paper on deriving stable bits from handwritten signatures.

Supervisions

• Lent 2006, Bioinformatics (Part II)
• Lent 2005, Advanced Systems Topics (Part II)
• Lent 2005, Programming in Java (Part IA)
• Michaelmas 2004, Security (Part II)

Software

• Handwritten signature capture [download] - it is a handy Java program to capture handwritten signature and build your own database. The data capturing is based on PenEvent, which was written during my final year project using JNI and can be regarded as a new added member in the Java Delegation Event Model. It is similar to MouseEvent, but fundamentally different in functionality. It is able to give information, like pressure, altitude, azimuth etc biometric data which MouseEvent couldn't. I used this program to build a signature database in my master research. If you are doing signature verification research, you will find it useful. Before using this program, you need to install Wintab, which is the industrial standard interface to tablets.
• JavaMP3 [readme][download] - This Java program is to play MP3 files, while displaying lyrics.
• OracleDBViewer [readme][download] - It has simple and friendly Java Swing interface to query oracle database and display in tabular format with sorting facility. It was written when querying oracle database was once my daily job. Professionals in the field usually use TOAD. But it is not free. It started with an idea of writing something simple, useful and FREE.
• Hack Sudoku [readme][download] - It is a matlab program to "hack" Sudoku, a popular puzzle published on the Times newspaper everyday. An online version here. The usual prize for the first one who emails the solution is a bottle of Champagne. More juicy prizes for solving the so called fiendish Sudoku. This program solves the "difficult" level Sudoku in 0.2 Sec. If you win the Champagne by using this program, don't need to give me credits. Just let me know. Here is another program [download] written in excel by a friend -- Glenton Jelbert. You need to enable macro to get it work. (You may ask whether it is secure to do so. You are rightfully cautious. Well, I tried this program, and I think apart from writing this "cheating" program, he hadn't done anything too bad.)

Hobbies

• Spicy food
• Football. Our team - Cambridge Chinese Football Club - won the Champion among 10 teams in 2006/2007 Cambridge MCR Football League Division II, and was promoted to Division I in the year after.