10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology

Authors - Rotimi Williams Bello, Pius A. Owolawi, Chunling Tu, Etienne A. van Wyk
Abstract - One of the mainstream methods for user identification has been by face. However, the vulnerability of face-swapping applications to security issues when swapping the faces between two different facial images, has undermined the genuine aims of the technology, thereby threatening the security of certain applications and individual users when such action is performed without caution. To address this, we propose the development of scalable and safe cloud architecture for a face-swapping application that lets users upload two photos and get a face-swapped output. This is achieved by: (1) creating a secure virtual private cloud (VPC) to hold all application resources, (2) using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to filter and safeguard requests, (3) putting application programming interface (API) Gateway into place to provide regulated access to the application's API, (4) processing and overseeing face-swapping operations with Lambda functions, (5) using VPC Endpoint to store input and output photos in Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets for private access, and (6) configuring a Simple Notification Service (SNS) to inform users of the progress and completion of their requests. A face swapping dataset derived from an open benchmark dataset was utilized for training and testing the proposed system. The experiment produced an effective solution with a 93% detection accuracy. The implications of this solution are: (1) the provision of security and private access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by VPC Endpoints and WAF, (2) elimination of Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway costs by utilizing VPC Endpoints for private S3 access, (3) offering of a scalable processing environment by Lambda functions without the need for server management, (4) delivering of real-time notifications by SNS to users regarding their request status, and (5) optimization of S3 storage ensures quick and efficient access to images.