An approach is presented how to practically determine which head-related transfer function (HRTF) profiles fit best for individuals wearing a bone conduction headphone. Such headphones may be particularly useful for visually impaired people (e.g., for navigation applications) as they do not obstruct the outer ear. Hence, it is still possible to perceive environmental sounds without restraints while wearing such headphones. For a fast and user-friendly identification of fitting HRTF profiles, an adapted tournament system is proposed. It could be shown that the results of the tournament method, where participants had to rate overall preference, externalization and envelopment, correlated well with the results of the localization task. The correlation was higher for the conventional headphones condition than for the bone conduction headphones condition. Analyses of the transmission characteristics show an uneven frequency response of bone conduction headphones compared to conventional headphones or speakers. In future research it will be investigated whether these findings are relevant for the auditory spatial perception at all and to what extent best fitting HRTFs may compensate for these phenomena.

We present a method to visualize and authenticate a cryptographically negotiated key for a secure phone call. That is, each caller is presented with a graphical representation of the key and through verbal interaction (i.e., side-channel authentication) they describe what they see. If they agree, the key is authenticated and the secure media session continues. The strength of the approach lies in the vocal recognition of the callers, and their ability to confirm the image displayed by their system. The necessary degree of visual recognition is achieved by using basic shapes, color and count. People, regardless of language or age, can easily identifying these images. Our experience shows that they can communicate what they see with little effort and terminate the call when they differ. We believe that this approach reverses the current trend in security to divest users from the underlying cryptographic principles supporting secure systems by abstracting these principles to a comprehensible and visual form. This paper demonstrates that visualization and the human factor can play a pivotal role in establishing a secure communication channel. This short paper discusses how a key is visualized and provides some initial user feedback. We have named this approach the Short Authentication SymbolS VisuallY (SASSY.)

We propose a Progressive Email Classifier (PEC) for high-speed classification of message patterns that are commonly associated with unsolicited bulk email (UNBE). PEC is designed to operate at the network access point, the ingress between the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and the enterprise network; so that a surge of UNBE containing fresh patterns can be detected before they spread into the enterprise network. A real-time scoreboard keeps track of detected feature instances (FI) based on a scoring and aging engine, until they are considered either from valid or UNBE sources. A FI of a valid email is discarded, but an anomalous one is passed to a blacklist to control (e.g., block or defer) subsequent emails containing the FI.