Preimage attack on BioHashing

Abstract

Biometric recognition is more and more employed in authentication and access control of various applications. Biometric data are strongly linked with the user and do not allow revocability nor diversity, without an adapted post-processing. Cancelable biometrics, including the very popular algorithm BioHashing, is used to cope with the underlying privacy and security issues. The principle is to transform a biometric template in a BioCode, in order to enhance user privacy and application security. These schemes are used for template protection of several biometric modalities, as fingerprints or face and the robustness is generally related to the hardness to recover the original biometric template by an impostor. In this paper, we propose to use genetic algorithms to approximate the original biometric feature and spoof the authentication system. We show through experimental results on fingerprints the efficiency of the proposed attack on the BioHashing algorithm, by approximating the original FingerCode, given the seed and the corresponding BioCode.