Fingerprint based symmetric cryptography

Key management is an important issue in traditional symmetric cryptography. It consists of key generation, key modification and key sharing to establish a message communication between partners. In general, a randomly generated key is shared with the counter partner by transmitting it along with the message or prior to the message communication. Maintaining privacy of cryptographic key determines the security of cryptography. Biometric is the alternate to maintain the privacy of key by protecting it with users biometric from unauthorized access. In this paper, a cryptographic key is linked with users fingerprint data. A string of binary number as cryptographic key is extracted from fingerprint template and this key is used to encrypt a message. During decryption process, the user is able to generate that cryptographic key from a fresh fingerprint instance to decrypt the encrypted message.