NFC smartphone based access control system using information hiding

A digital access control system allows users to access a premise using an access card. It is introduced as an alternative system to the most common access control system using physical keys and mechanical locks to increase the level of convenience to access a premise. However, an intruder is able to gain access to the premise if he/she possesses the access card or the physical keys. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an access control system that utilizes near field communication (NFC) smartphone and information hiding technique to overcome the disadvantage mentioned previously on the existing systems. The first protection level is NFC smartphone and NFC reader or tag to initiate the access control to the premise. The second protection level is the information hiding technique to embed access passcode into the user's photo to obtain an encoded photo, which is also known as stego-photo. The access passcode in the stego-photo is later extracted using information hiding technique during the door access stage for verification of the legitimate user. An automated door is developed and NFC reader or tag is located near the door. The interaction between NFC smartphone and NFC reader or tag enables prompting of the correct stego-photo to be selected using the smartphone to perform the user authentication process. The door is unlocked if the access passcode extracted from the stego-photo matches with the access passcode in the database located at the server. If otherwise, alarm is triggered and a light emitting diode (LED) is turned on. The lighted LED acts as an indicator to give an alert to the user that someone has tried to break into his/her house when he/she is not around.