Securing Biometric Authentication Through Multimodal Watermarking

The focus of user authentication is shifting from password based systems to biometrics based systems. The issue with biometrics is that they are susceptible to modifications and when attacked, can not be changed like a password. It is also required that a biometric trait used to access one system should not be used to access other systems. This paper proposes a multimodal solution where the iris of a person is modified using the minutia from the fingerprint image by treating the minutia as a watermark. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach where the recognition rate after the watermarking process is only slightly decreased. The proposed approach satisfies the diversity requirement where a template stolen from one biometric based authentication system can not be used to access another system as the fingerprint minutia are watermarked in a unique way for every authentication system. The proposed approach also outperforms traditional biometric systems in-terms of execution time.