A Privacy Enhanced Facial Recognition Access Control System Using Biometric Encryption

Abstract

With a modest adoption of biometrics for security controls, privacy remains a great concern for many individuals as biometric features, once compromised, cannot be renewed and will render protected resources vulnerable to a number of attacks by a threat agent. Several biometric encryption mechanisms have been proposed to preserve privacy, however there has been very little industry usage and implementation. In this paper, a practical biometric encryption technique is presented. The proposed approach is used to provide the desired level of privacy for stored biometric templates through anonymization. This scheme also addresses the limitation of renewability as biometric templates are fused with a biometric key, which may be renewed in the event of compromise of the biometric key. A prototype of the proposed scheme indicates that it could be a viable replacement for traditional biometric security controls with an increased confidence in the preservation of the end-user's privacy.