Umar Yahya

Umar Yahya, Ndawula Noah, Asingwire Hanifah et al.

Effective management of public shared spaces such as car parking space, is one challenging transformational aspect for many cities, especially in the developing World. By leveraging sensing technologies, cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence, Cities are increasingly being managed smartly. Smart Cities not only bring convenience to City dwellers, but also improve their quality of life as advocated for by United Nations in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal on Sustainable Cities and Communities. Through integration of Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, this paper presents a successful proof-of-concept implementation of a framework for managing public car parking spaces. Reservation of parking slots is done through a cloud-hosted application, while access to and out of the parking slot is enabled through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which in real-time, accordingly triggers update of the parking slot availability in the cloud-hosted database. This framework could bring considerable convenience to City dwellers since motorists only have to drive to a parking space when sure of a vacant parking slot, an important stride towards realization of sustainable smart cities and communities.

Cherinor Umaru Bah, Afzaal Hussain Seyal, Umar Yahya

Internet banking (IB) continues to face security concerns arising from illegal access to users accounts. Use of personal identification numbers (PIN) as a single authentication method for IB users is prone to insecurities such as phishing, hacking and shoulder surfing. Fingerprint matching (FPM) as an alternative to PIN equally has a downside as fingerprints reside on individual mobile devices. A survey we conducted from 170 IB respondents of 5 different banks in Brunei established that majority (65%) of them preferred use of biometric authentication methods. In this work, we propose a two-level integrated authentication mechanism (2L-IAM). At the first level, the user logs in to their IB portal using either PIN or FPM. At the second level, user is authenticated by means of face recognition (FR) should they initiate a transaction classified as sensitive. The merits of the introduced 2L-IAM are 3-fold: - (1) FR guarantees the identity of the rightful user irrespective of the login device; (2) By classifying banking products sensitivity, the sensitive transactions are more effectively secured; (3) It is accommodative of different users authentication preferences. Adoption of this framework could thus improve both users and banks experiences in terms of enhanced security and service delivery respectively.