Secure Biometric Templates from Fingerprint-Face Features

Abstract

Since biometric data cannot be easily replaced or revoked, it is important that biometric templates used in biometric applications should be constructed and stored in a secure way, such that attackers would not be able to forge biometric data easily even when the templates are compromised. This is a challenging goal since biometric data are "noisy" by nature, and the matching algorithms are often complex, which make it difficult to apply traditional cryptographic techniques, especially when multiple modalities are considered. In this paper, we consider a "fusion " of a minutiae-based fingerprint authentication scheme and an SVD-based face authentication scheme, and show that by employing a recently proposed cryptographic primitive called "secure sketch ", and a known geometric transformation on minutiae, we can make it easier to combine different modalities, and at the same time make it computationally infeasible to forge an "original" combination of fingerprint and face image that passes the authentication. We evaluate the effectiveness of our scheme using real fingerprints and face images from publicly available sources.